For as long as I can remember, my family has celebrated the European holiday of St. Nicholas Day. Children all over Europe put out their shoes on the night of the 5th, sometimes filled with straw and carrots to feed St. Nicholas' horse. St. Nicholas then fills the shoes with candies, fruit, and little presents. Since I was a little girl, we have put our red, wooden shoes every December 5th. For me, this represents the start of the Christmas season. In fact, lots of times I was more excited about St. Nicholas Day than Christmas. I think, because, it was alway exciting to see what St. Nick would bring that would fit into our shoes. It couldn't be big or necessarily extravagant, and we didn't put in "requests" or "write a list". It felt more like a surprise to me. I've continued this tradition with my boys. This year they were VERY EXCITED. They put their snowboots under the Christmas tree on Friday evening. Both kept talking about St. Nick coming into our house and filling their boots. Matt was very curious if St. Nick would come into his bedroom while he was sleeping or if he would see his pajamas. They woke up a bit early Saturday morning and rushed to look in their boots. Throughout the rest of the day, they both kept mentioning how St. Nicholas knew what they liked. Matt got a small Nerf football and Adam got a Crazy 8s game.
We put our tree up this weekend--well, three of them. I decided to only do one big tree. I hadn't intended to use all of the ornaments (300 of them), but they boys wanted to. I took my brothers' advice and allowed Adam and Matthew to decorate the tree. I didn't comment once on where they placed them, and I haven't moved any of them. That's a major accomplishment for me. And you know, it was more fun. I didn't have to stress about decorating the tree or the time involved, since the boys did it. Yesterday afternoon, after church, we decorated two small Christmas trees. One went into Adam's room and the other into Matt's.
5 comments:
What a great tradition. And congrats to you for having a less stressful tree decorating experience.
We lived in Iceland when I was preschool age for 2 years. I remember the shoe thing and I remember we didn't have a christmas tree so we left a note by our ceramic one explaining to Santa Clause that they didn't have them there. And it was fun finding candy in my shoes!
Good job with letting the kids do the tree! At my house growing up most of the ornaments were wooden or stuffed/sewn so nothing breakable with the 3 of us kids doing the decorating. The tree was also ALWAYS naked on the bottom 1/3 because we had big dogs whose happy tails would have demolished decorations. So at least your tree looks nice and probably has ornaments all over! :)
Good for you, Heidi, for following my advice (I'm so wise ;) ). Happy memories are way more important than how the tree looks. Besides, the tree is only up for about a month, while the memories last a lifetime. See you in a couple weeks!
It's fun to see how St. Nicholas day will be done when the twins can participate more! I'm so lucky to have your lead to follow.
Hey,
On blurb.com I watched the video on how to make a blog a book and was all excited to do it. Uploaded the software and the blogger option wasn't there. Found out they had some problems so they took it off. They said I'd have to copy and paste. I could do that with the text, but for the pictures I'd have to bring them up from a folder and insert them. It'd be a lot of work.
I'll let you know if I find another site.
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