Don’t you just love this time of year? The buildup and anticipation to Christmas Day. I love Christmas and all the traditions we have associated with it as a family and I especially adore Christmas Eve traditions and sprinkling DIY magic reindeer food for the reindeers and their long journey.
It is hard to believe that we have been doing an acts of kindness advent calendar for four years. It all started when I was concerned that the boys were becoming rather immersed in the commercialisation of Christmas and of advent. I wanted them to understand and learn about Christmas and advent being about giving, so came up with the idea of an alternative advent calendar.
What can I say, I love homemade decorations and Christmas is the perfect time to make and gift them and these simple and affordable DIY star Christmas ornaments are perfect for decorating your tree and home.
Every year we make salt dough or corn flour ornaments and unfortunately they got damp in storage and they were ruined, so this got me thinking about using Air drying clay for a more permanent Christmas decoration.
I want to share our Christmas Wrapping ideas for this year. I love wrapping Christmas presents with brown paper. Brown kraft paper is always something that I have a roll off so is perfect for emergency gift wrapping. I have to say that this was inspired by Heather from Growing Spaces Fun Christmas Gift Wrap Ideas. More specifically the Beard one.
I love Christmas and the Advent. I really want to celebrate advent and use the time to focus on the true meaning of Christmas and make it about giving and have a joy filled time with my family. I want advent to be about more than just opening a door on an advent calendar and getting a piece of chocolate, I want it to be a time where we cement our family traditions and give joy to other people.
I am delighted to share with you these free advent acts of kindness printables. This year we have gone with an adorable bauble design. Wow, I can not believe that we have been doing acts of kindness at advent for the last three years!
Is it sacrilege to be mentioning the C word in July? The c-word you ask, yes, Christmas. When do you start thinking and preparing for Christmas? I tend to do some preparation in January and then start thinking about it when I see the summer sales.
We are on a roll with our confetti crafts this week. We are getting prepared for oir New Years’ Celebration here with these toilet roll confetti poppers, but they are also perfect for weddings, 4th July or any other kind of party. They are super simple to make and the kids love them plus they make any party go with a bang!
We first learned about Snowman Soup from our friends at Diary of a Frugal Family a long, long, time ago and it has been part of our Christmas Eve Traditions and annual teacher gifts since then. It is super simple to make and tastes delicious.
One of our favorite family tradition is all snuggling up together and enjoying a family film and to celebrate this we are working with Sky Movies this Christmas and sharing their personalised Sky Movies #MovieMe Christmas Cards, along with our festive sugar and spice seasoning and free popcorn box printables.
Reindeer food is one of our Christmas Eve traditions and we love to make it as much as the boys love sprinkling it outside as treats for the reindeer. We have great fun each year making it for family and friends and this year I am excited to share with you 7 great free printable labels for you designed by The Purple Pumpkin Blog using the same designs as our Advent Acts of Kindness. Traditionally it is just oats (oatmeal) and glitter, but, we live in a pretty rural area and we stopped putting glitter in our reindeer food a few years back to protect the local wildlife. Now we more »
Can you remember what you got for Christmas last year or the year before? I know that I can’t. In fact as I get older these things seem more and more important to me, so this year I am going to create a Christmas memories book for us to use. Sort of like a scrapbook where we can record our memories of the festive season. Experiences and people that made it special. I always promise that I will do scrapbooks, but I never seen to have the time, so I am happy for this to be quick and simple and I am going to pop it in a bag in the advent more »
We love advent and one of the ways we celebrate is to have an advent wreath or ring that we light each sunday to help celebrate the lead up to Christmas. The first Sunday of advent for 2014 in November 30th. Me and the boys have spend the last few days making this years advent ring, even though it is more of a plinth! People light one candle on the first Sunday of Advent, two on the second Sunday, three on the third Sunday and all four on the fourth Sunday. Some people then continue to light all four candles during the Christmas period. Traditionally an advent ring has three purple and more »
We love Reindeer food. It is a tradition in The Mad House to go out and sprinkle it on Christmas Eve and to track Santa on Norad. There are endless recipes for Reindeer food on the internet and mine is no different or special, but it is much loved and used over the years.
I blogged last year about our Christmas traditions, about creating memories and making our own traditions as a family. Including a little of mine and MadDads best Christmas’s and sprinkling some new things, some things that are unique to us and to our life. I want these tradition to cement the boys memories of their Christmas’s past and lead them happily in to their Christmas’s of their future. We have our advent stocking activities each day, which is wonderful and we also make sure that we have done all the shopping, wrapping and running around by Christmas Eve and we make a big day of it. The Christmas Eve Elves more »
I adore Christmas and all that is brings, partly maybe due to being a Christmas baby (it is my birthday on 20 December). So I love decorations and one of the great things about getting older is that I am no longer hung up on everything needing to be matching and co-ordinating. In fact I am embracing my inner child and we have even gone for coloured lights on a white tree in the dinning room. I love the fact that we have been collecting decorations each year and adding to them, they carry so many memories, so much of our history as a family. Yep I am a sentimental old more »
Even though last week was snowed off for the school, the children and the teachers have worked really hard to ensure that the nativities took place this week. Maxi’s was first on Thursday and it was a Snowman at Sunset and yes, I cried. Maxi doesn’t do dressing up, so as a narrator he only had to war his hat, scarf and gloves. It was a wonderful show and I have to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when one of his little classmates did a solo at the end. Friday saw Mini’s show, which was whoops a daisy angel, hats off to the teachers on this more »
A large part of simplifying Christmas for me is making it all about homemade. Homemade decorations and homemade gifts I am a great believer in that the simpler things are, the more effective they are.
One of the main ways we start the festive season is by making our advent crown or wreath. This is one of the many things I remember doing as a child, however, I remember the Blue Peter version of wire coat hangers, tinsel and open flames!!
