Christmas Traditions: Part 2

Last year, I posted a fun Christmas tradition that we have implemented with our children. You can read about it here. We give the kids pajamas in their cute bucket every year. The only sad thing about that post was that it was labeled "Christmas Traditions: Part 1" and I never wrote another Christmas Traditions post that December.
But we are still a pretty new family and are trying to figure out some traditions throughout the years.
Well in this post you will find TWO more traditions we are implementing this year.
The first involves my cutie patootie daughter. :) We decided this year that she is old enough to write a letter to Santa.

Since she can't exactly write yet, I dotted out each letter for her to trace over to write her letter. She has been talking about a big girl bike ever since her cousin got one last year. Here is her letter, after she traced all of the letters. She was REALLY proud of her letter and we are going to mail it to Santa this week at Macy's (because for every Santa letter put in a special mailbox at Macy's, they'll donate $1 to Make A Wish foundation. Read more about that here.). Since our Spidey isn't quite old enough, we didn't have him write a letter this year. But next year, for sure. :)

The other tradition that I wanted to share with you was something my sister in law had brought up a couple of months ago. She found the blog post herel and she blogged about the way they are going to do the tradition herel (Yes, I know that says "herel" instead of "here"...my link tool is being dumb and the only way to keep the link was to not delete the last letter of the web address).

I have heard many people say that the commercialism of Christmas is getting out of hand and I completely agree. Christmas is a time to reflect on the birth of our Savior and we give gifts to celebrate his birth. So because we want our children to remember Christ during Christmas, we decided to focus on giving them 3 gifts that represent the gifts the 3 wisemen brought when Jesus was born.

Gold- Something our children REALLY want.

Frankincense- Something our children need.

Myrrh- A spiritual gift to help them grow.

Santa will still be bringing them a gift from him and their stockings will still be filled. When they get older, they will probably exchange gifts between each other (and hopefully by then we'll have some more kids to add into the exchange) but for now, 4 gifts (including Santa's gift) is plenty for them to enjoy. And hopefully, by organizing our Christmas this way, we can help them to focus on the main reason we give gifts.

And that's how Suze sees it.