It’s time for another Girlhood Giveaway. This time we’re giving away a “Stepping Heavenward” Girlhood Home Companion bundle
and a December print addition of The Mother Daughter Tea Cozy Club Booklet and audio conversation on CD: The Gingerbread Cottage of Faith ~ Building Our Daughters’ Faith with Heather Wombacher to two separate winners.
Here are the entry rules: Leave a comment about some of your favorite Christmas traditions or recipes. Share any or all of the ways you make Christmas a special time in your home. Do you have a special memory from a childhood Christmas? Did your mother have a certain holiday tradition or recipe that you have kept? What are some of the meaningful ways you celebrate Christmas or New Years? Answer any or all of the above topics in your comment.
A winner will be drawn on December 10th.
Merry CHRISTmas,
Jill Novak & Company
And the winners are :
Random Integer Generator
Here are your random numbers:
43 75 Kristi Stace and Jenifer Harrod Congratulations, ladies!
We make a Happy Birthday, Jesus cake for Christmas Day, advent experience through the season, 3 gifts for each child and a stocking, walking through Christmas lights neighborhood.
I bake cut out sugar cookies that the children decorate with sprinkles – a carry over from my child hood, we read The Night Before Christmas and the Real Christmas Story before bed on Christmas Eve even though we don’t do Santa, it’s more of a tradition again carried over from my child hood. We watch Christmas specials and cartoons and Christmas Eve we visit with my dad, step-mom, two of my brothers and then travel to my inlaws and we aim to make it to church if it has service that night (a lot of churches in our area have done away with Christmas Eve services or make them so late they aren’t feasible for families with small children) Christmas Day the children wake up, open presents, my mom and other brother come over and we exchange gifts with them have some snack foods since we had a big feast on Thanksgiving and just enjoy one another.
Since being married, Christmas has changed a lot for us. We had to make sure we went to BOTH sides of the family. Neither of which had any traditions, just parties! Needless to say, after said events, we would sneak away and celebrate a beautiful and most reverent Christmas Midnight Mass. A few years ago as we started having more children, we decided that we needed to stop exposing our children to the FAKE Christmases and bring Christ AND tradition back into our family and we did just that. Midnight Mass is still a must. Along with tree decorating, there are beautiful movies and music, gingerbread house decorating contest, and all of those little simple things that most people grew up with way back when! The wonderful thing about tradition is that most people crave it as well. And so we have had many a family member asking if they could join us for Christmas or if we could host some kind of Christmas function . It’s nothing new that we do. Quite the contrary. It’s amazing what happens when you bring Christ back into Christmas 😉
We didn’t have a lot of tradition as I was growing up, but I have started one with my children that seems to be very important to them. We have a set of “Adornement ornaments” from Family Life, which have the different names of Christ on them, with the meaning of each name explained. On Christmas eve, we take turns reading the different names and meanings, one by one, adding each just read ornament to the tree.
Last year when I said maybe we would not do that because we were pressed for time, the youngest children were upset and adament that they really loved to do that. I had not realized how much they looked forward to that new “tradition”.
One recipe we make every Christmas is a traditional Dundee cake, the top is decorated all round with whole almonds – very delicious. We usually also make chocolate fudge to wrap in pretty bags and tie with ribbon, for little gifts. This year, our family appear to be beginning a new tradition – singing carols in ‘the green’ near the church. I do hope it is not too frosty!
Whatever your traditions, our family wish you all, a blessed, peaceful and merry Christmas
Each child gets a new book for Christmas. We also buy an ornament for each child every year. When they leave home they can take their ornaments with them
We didn’t have a lot of traditions, but there was one that I always cherish even now that my Mom passed on. We would always make during the day on Christmas eve a traditional dessert from Puerto Rico known as sweet rice pudding. I woul assist her with the stirring and crushing certain ingredients and the smell of spices. How I miss making it with her. Now that she is no longer with us I keep this tradition with my daughters and they love to assist and taste, in hope that it continues on with them and when they have their daughters. Still the smell of those spices remind me of the time spent with my Mom and now with my young daughters.
We take our Christmas cards for the year and keep them in a special basket all year long. We try to stay in the habit of pulling one out at suppertime to pray for that person or family. When we are faithful with it, it is a wonderful time to hear our children pray for others. This year we are using Ann Voskamp’s Jesse Tree Journey to celebrate Advent. (It’s free and has really been a blessing so far.)
We have a special chocolate gravy and biscuits that was my grandmother’s recipe and my mom still fixes it as do I for my children at Christmas.
We love decorating the tree together as a family, eating popcorn and playing Christmas music. Being together as a family is what is wonderful for me.
My dad made homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast every Christmas morning. I think sometimes now he makes homemade donuts.
We have watched the Hallmark movie the Christmas Card for several years now. I am trying to kind of start my own tradition of watching White Christmas every year.
I think our favorite Christmas tradition is Advent. We all enjoy they time to together and the books that we pick to read at that time. Of course there are squabbles about who will light the candles, but I’ll take that 🙂 because with it comes the reminder from each of the kids throughout the day “don’t forget we’ve got advent tonight” It is a time that I look forward too each year and try to find ways to keep it special. Of course the best thing about it is it keeps Jesus right in front of us during this busy time. We also make cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning.
Memories from my childhood sneak up on me when I’m not expecting it. This year I was decorating my dining room and I had bought red cardinals last year at the craft store right after Christmas and so I found them this year. I’ve put them in the greenery on the table and on the buffet. My husband came in and saw them and said “You and Betty love those cardinals” Betty is my grandmother and she loves Cardinals. She had them everywhere in her house and they seemed to increase around Christmas. It’s funny how now when I look at them I think of her and Christmas.
Every year we pick a new place to go to see Christmas lights. Also, we always open a pair of new pajamas on Christmas Eve. My husband makes homemade fudge for us every year. 🙂
One of my favorite recipes that we make every year is homemade peppermint patties!
My mom always made chocolate covered cherry cookies and they became my FAVORITE Christmas cookie (here is the link to recipe http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-covered-cherry-cookies-ii/ ) So now that is our tradition…and I”ve already made a couple batches BEFORE Christmas this year because they are SO SO good. Christmas is a time that my mom goes ALL out and I try to do the same in our home. She has MANY trees (not all big trees necessarily but trees throughout the house) So I have trees in bedrooms; bathrooms and make sure the entire home is filled with Christmas decor.
Each year we get each one of our children an ornament so that when they leave the home they’ll take their ornaments and HOPEFULLY have a small childhood tree somewhere in their home to remember each Christmas they spent at home growing up.
I think it’s SO very important to begin the Christmas day (before presents are opened and the celebration begins and busyness of the day 🙂 to spend some time in God’s Word to reflect back on the Christmas story. That’s what CHRISTmas is all about…Jesus’ birth.
WE never had BIG Christmas’ as we didn’t have a lot of monies but I remember my parents ALWAYS doing whatever to make CHRISTmas a special time for my brother and I. I want to do the same for our children…make it special but not get so wrapped up in the giving of expensive gifts. It’s the simple things that bring the most happiness and have the most meaning.
Making new Christmas traditions with my kids…advent craft ornaments, unwrapping and reading a Christmas book each day till Christmas, Jesus birthday cake christmas morning, letting the kids”buy” their own gifts for others, etc! Thanks for the great giveaway!
In my family, we have a couple traditions, but these two are my favorites-
We go driving around, looking at Christmas lights- there is a lake nearby that is AMAZING- its so beautiful.
Also, we have a stocking tradition: Each year, we each draw a name- that’s the family member’s stocking that we shop for. Then we go to Ten Thousand Villages (a completely fair trade store) and each get fifteen dollars to spend. Then, on Christmas Eve, we put the gifts we got into the stocking. On Christmas day, when we open the stockings, we guess who stuffed it. We do this because a) we don’t need a lot of presents, so the stocking is just a couple little things b) it supports artisans in different countries who need the money c) its simple and fun! 🙂
I make pecan tassies each year for Christmas. We like them much better than cookies and they’re a family tradition from my great-grandmother.
Traditions: christmas lights drive-by, pizza for our (very large) extended family and a gathering on Christmas eve, peanut butter bon-bons, hanging a nail on the bottom of the tree to remember another tree and the Savior who died there in our place, acts of service in the community, anonymous gifts for those less fortunate, etc…. I could go on and on. 🙂 Pure Joy!
make up homemade goodie baskets for neighbors
I have heard of a tradition in a friend’s family to have an ornament that opens up and each person in the family has written a small one-line of what they are thankful for. Then next year, you read the previous years’ and write a new one. We’d like to do this in our family.
Thanks!
Nancy
Our tradition up until this year has been to spend much of the holiday season in the hospital with my oldest daughter. When we’re not doing that, we put up the Christmas tree and visit either my parents or my husband’s. We also usually bake cookies for our church’s living nativity, which we hope to all participate in as the kids get older. We’re trying to start some more Christ-centered traditions this year, like an advent calendar and devotions. Hoping this year is the start of a new Christmas tradition.
We make Jesus a birthday cake every year, and try to do an advent each year. My children like to bake cookies, and this year we may go help serve a christmas dinner in the community which I would really like to become a tradition.
I find Christmas to be the besttime of the year. Afterall it is a celebration of my saviours birthday. I get to see all my children and grandchildren. I love making cookies with the grandchildren they are so proud of them and can’t wait to share them with their papa and daddy.
With all young children, we’re still working on building up traditions and finding out which ones we love. One tradition is to attend the Christmas Eve service at our church. I really enjoy that. The pastor’s wife reads a Christmas children’s book to all the kids who are seated on the floor at the front of the room. It’s really sweet!
Love the giveaway! Thanks!
We have a cake recipe that goes back at least 100 years or longer. My mother and I have become the usual makers of this cake. I am now teaching my girls how to make it. There was another cake that my grandmother made and sold every year for the holidays. I am not the recipient of this recipe or the special pan. I am hoping that my uncle will allow me to have that recipe and special pans as his health is failing.
I helped every year with these recipes and a few others, but as a young adult did not see the need to follow or want to follow. As a mother, I want to pass this info down to my children and nephew and niece. I will be teaching my nephew how to make one of the cakes this month. I look forward to it.
We didn’t have a lot of traditions growing up but my Mom or grandma always made a special bread recipe that my sister, sisters-in-law, and I now make ourselves with our families…Anise Seed Bread. 🙂
These last two years we have decorated our tree with minitature lamplighter books that our family has read together throughout the years. Also it has been our family tradition since we found Christ to read in the Gospel of Luke about our Savior’s birth on Christmas morning.
We are building new traditions in our family. This year we watched The Nativity Story – we loved it! It will now be our tradition to watch this for our first christmas movie to get us into the spirit of the season. We were all riveted to the screen and couldn’t find a stopping place to pause to change a diaper – which is funny because we all know how the story goes! It’s an amazing and inspiring movie and it’s not the least bit cheesy. We are also making nativity cutouts and a North star cutout for decorating our house – much cheaper and easier to store for the year! We are making them out of spare plywood we have lying around. Decorating our house with lights is the first thing we do every year, before the rains come 🙂
We enjoy a Christmas program by the children at our Christian school. We also enjoy caroling with our church group. A favorite of the children is going to Grandma’s house, but personally for me the best part is simply being together with loved ones.
My mom always welcomed folks into our home for the holidays.We have continued that tradition in our home. We never know who it might be, but we almost always have had someone that would otherwise have been alone. It always make the celebration a happier one. 🙂
We also always read from Luke and share the story of our Savior’s birth.
We enjoy decorating the tree together. We have about 12 advent calendars of various sorts around the house and go through those each day, some have Jesus stories or Nativity scenes, others are musical, have baby or family pictures, etc…a wide variety. We have many Nativity sets that we put out around the house – probably 7-10 of them and each seems to have a special memory with it. Like the one my dad made for my grandma many years ago, and then when she died I inherited it. Or the Veggie Tales one with the star that sings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (not in the best voice) :o) At dinnertime, we light advent candles and my husband reads a devotion and some bible verses and it seems to lead to precious times of talking. Often we end the time with singing “For Unto Us a Child is Born.” We enjoy going to Christmas Eve service and then come home and open presents. On Christmas Day my siblings and their families all converge at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and many of us are able to stay several days to 1 week and enjoy each others company.
When I was a teen I lived my senior year with a Christian family who introduced me to the concept of Christmas traditions and how to spend a Christ-centered Christmas. One of the traditions that I carried into my marriage and family is specially selecting and giving ornaments to our four children each year so they have memories, as well as ornaments to decorate their trees with once they are grown. I still put the ornaments I received during the time I lived with that Christ-loving family. Each year all of the ornaments are pulled from each child’s special ornament box and the memories start to flow.
On Christmas morning, the first event of the day is gathering together by the fire and taking communion together as a family. The greatest gift truly is our salvation by grace through faith in Jesus!
My fondest memory of Christmas was of 1953, I was 3yrs.old. While the radio played Burl Ives songs, my mother melted wax bars and made candles by pouring that hot wax over a wick and chunks of ice in a quart sized milk carton. When the ice melted Mom poured off the water and after the candle dried, she pulled the carton away and a lovely lace candle appeared. When she lit the wick the light shined through many holes. It was magical to me.
That very same night we baked sugar cookies and sprinkled them with red and green crystal sugar. I can still smell the candles and the cookies today.
Our Christmas tree had bubble lights on it. A little bubble traveled up the stem of the candle every few seconds.
That year my grandparents gave me a little rubber dolly. Daddy and momma gave me a real baby brother with short wavy blond hair and big blue eyes.
Our favorite tradition is making the gingerbread house every year. We have just enough children in the nearby family now that each gets his or her own side or rooftop to decorate, so every part of it displays the individual’s personality. We also bake a ton of cookies and treats: bonbons, Russian tea balls, and yeasties are the most popular, but we do simple sugar cookies and my semi-famous chocolate chunk cookies as well. The town next to us has a lights display we drive through every year, and we also see a live nativity every year at a church near our home. It’s all about Jesus and family!
When I was little, my mom would make Martha Washington Balls. She was never a big candy maker – she could mess up the easy fool proof fudge recipes, even! I remember eating many a batch of “fool proof fudge” with a spoon. But her Martha Washington Balls always turned out great. My three year old loves to help me out in the kitchen, so I’m looking forward to trying these with her. I’m sure they won’t be even remotely ball-shaped, but that’s OK. Everyone will know they were homemade with love!
We have the tradition of giving our gifts to each other on Christmas Eve and leaving the 25th open to serving others and focusingon Jesus.
My children are finally old enough (4 1/2) and (2 1/2) to understand the true meaning of Christmas. So, this year, we’ve started some new traditions! We’ve hand made an advent calendar, seen a live production of The Christmas Story and listened to Christmas music while decorating the tree and house. I love this time of year!
When I was a child at home, my brother and sister and I would all campout in my sister’s room downstairs. Each year we woke about 5 a.m. (well ahead of Mom and Dad) and we would wait as long as we could stand it, then we always thought of a creative way to wake them (one year my sister and I had practiced Christmas songs on our respective instruments and played them in the furnace room which delivered the sound to every room in the house).
Now, with my own little family, we seek out a family that has no other family in the area and can’t “go home” for Christmas and have them over for a special Christmas Eve dinner. Then Christmas morning, our children get to take their stockings to their rooms and open them up while my husband and I rouse ourselves to alertness. Then he makes a big breakfast for us. After which we take our time opening gifts, sometimes lasting several hours because we take breaks and play or eat some more. No rush, no chaos. Just savoring the time together and being thankful for our great blessings.
My Mom would come the second week in December and make cut out cookies with my 2 children. My husband and I would finish (or start) out Christmas shopping during that time. Now i do the same for my daughter and make cookies with my grandchildren while they finish their shopping…..My son and his family live to far from me to do this for him and his wife…
We try to make the entire month of advent special to take the focus off of the gifts. We bake cookies and take them to the police, fire department, doctors, nursing homes, the homeless shelter, anywhere we can think of that they might bring encouragement. We do Christmas crafts, make cards, sing carols, do our advent devotion by candlelight, read a different Christmas book every night, and the kids do a couple Secret Santa for each other. This year our tenth child is due a week before Christmas, so that has added some excitement too!
My mother always loved the Christmas holiday and painted a ceramic village for it. Every year we would carefully take each house/person/tree out of the box and create a special village while listening to Christmas music. Now I have it and do the same with my children.
Every year we have a different kind of tree. This year’s tree is a bamboo tree. We are trying to stat a new tradition of doing advent calenders for each of the children’s rooms. One for the girls and one for the boys.
We have an empty, decorated box that we place as the first present under our tree, and we each put a slip of paper with a gift we are going to give Jesus in the coming year. It might be an actual, physical gift (like a donation to a specific cause), or a gift of time, energy, discipleship, etc. When our children were younger, we would bake a special tree-shaped cake and have it for dessert on Christmas day, as we sang Happy Birthday to Jesus. We also have several special Christmas stories we read around the Christmas tree every year–a tree that we pick out at a local farm that feels much more festive than a tree lot.
we pack operation Christmas Child shoeboxes every year, use Ann Voscamp’s Jesse tree devotional, and have a homemade advent calendar to go along with it 🙂 then, for Christmas Dinner, we have an ethnic Christmas celebration and meal from the country where our shoeboxes ended up the year before 🙂
We have Christmas Eve at my parents’ house after church service. We have baked ham and cheese sandwiches (with poppyseeds, swiss and a touch of horseradish) that we don’t usually have at any other time of year.
I remember as a child my dad got the idea to surprise us and hired a santa to come to our house. I screamed and ran up the steps and my brother had to drag me down the steps! I laugh now because my dad was always being very much a spoil-his-children father and that one back fired on him! My mother always put all the leaves in the table which took up the entire room and wow was it a spread. When my husband came to our house for the firs time he said he felt like he was at the Walton’s. My parents were the best and they made lots of memories both at Christmas and through life. Thank you for another contest!