Keeping the Magic in Christmas
A few of the secrets to keeping the “magic” in Christmas…
I love Christmas, but as the MOM of a big family, most of the Christmas details are my responsibility. Our family traditions include gift making, cookie baking, cookie delivering, shopping, gift wrapping, decorating and more. When the girls were young, I wanted to share my passion for the holidays with them, so I made a decision to place sharing the Christmas “magic” togetherness time a top priority. That meant that some of the final products were not the “perfect” craft projects we now see on Pinterest but we had fun together and that created our “magic” each year.
We serve traditional Armenian foods on Christmas day so there is a lot of do ahead food prep which my fantastic husband helps me prepare. (He is quite the team player when it comes to Armenian Christmas dinner cooking because he gets to taste as we go and he always gets rewarded with hot Armenian bread right out of the oven.) So we make a date night out of our food prep and it brings a little bit of “magic” to our Christmas each year.
We love to decorate our home and share the spirit and “magic” of Christmas with friends and family. The girls love to have a Tacky Sweater Party, and I usually have a Cookie Exchange and we also love to invite people over for dinner after Christmas Eve services so there always seems to be a cooking project going in the kitchen during December. The girls and I have developed recipes that we traditionally make only at Christmas time. Spending time together cooking and baking is fun. More hands means it often takes more time to complete the projects and more mess to clean up but this is the time of year to slow down, find teachable moments and share the “magic”. The decorations WILL get put up, cookies WILL get baked, the meals WILL get made and the dishes WILL eventually get done. So let the expectations for perfection go! Enjoy the people and share the joy.
Today I wanted to start my decorating and I wanted to share the fun of decorating this afternoon with my husband…we actually had to clean the garage for 3-4 hours before we could even get the decorations down. I had to dig deep to muster up the Christmas “magic” and appreciate the help being offered to clean rather than decorate and remember that before December 25th the house will be beautiful and the decorations will be in place. That decision changed the rest of my day and allowed me to keep my priorities straight. When I remember the true meaning of Christmas and how much love God has for me and for all humanity I am humbled. His sacrifice is so much bigger than my daily sacrifices of my agenda and my time frame, but I need my faith and His power to give up willingly. I just came back from a women’s christmas event where I learned that I need to give up my expectations of my “perfect” Christmas and exchange them for my “perfect” Christ.
So here are a few practical and fun ways to help stay organized in December so that your heart is focused on the blessings of Christmas and you can catch a little bit of “magic” every day.
1) Chose one or two creative gift ideas that you can make in batches way before December. There are many ideas on Pinterest or crafting websites. I make big batches of apple butter and fruit jam in the fall and then all I have to do in December is decorate the tops of the jars. Tonight we saw all sorts of wonderful easy to make decorations that would be fun to give as gifts.
2) Pick out one wrapping paper design per person (if you buy double sided paper you can use one roll for two people). This makes it easy to organize your wrapping and labeling and easier to distribute the gifts to their recipient on Christmas day.
3) Take your Christmas card picture options throughout the year to relieve the pressure of the “perfect family photo shoot” in December.
4) Organize a cookie baking party where a few friends get together and bake 1 or 2 recipes each. then you divide up all the goodies. You make one big mess on one long day with tons of fellowship and laughter and everyone goes home with enough cookies for the family and to share with neighbors and friends.
What is one of your secrets to keeping the “magic” in your Christmas preparations?
Remember “Emmanuel-God with us” and look for Him everyday during the Christmas season…actually look for Him everyday.
