I love the idea of the “morning basket” for homeschooling. If you don’t know what that means, go here. It’s basically morning gathering time where you share things you are excited about with your children. For me, that means read aloud time! You can get lots of ideas from Pam Barnhill’s website that I just linked, plus her podcast about it. The above photo is not of my pretty Christmas morning basket, but that of Abby Stone from Rooted in Rest. It’s a screenshot of her video down below. I don’t even have a basket and you don’t need one either to do Morning Basket time.

I also love the idea of rotating out what we use for morning basket according to the season and/or month and the needs of my children. Especially for Christmas! We’re taking a break from most of the basket materials we’ve used for fall. We will do mostly Christmas stuff for December and the first half of January. I just love reading about and immersing ourselves in the history and lore of Christmas!

Here’s what we are doing:

1. The book above. I’m reading a few pages a day from it. When I was a kid, I got a jigsaw puzzle about Christmas traditions around the world. I’ve been using it ever since, every Christmas. It’s fun to see some of the traditions explained in the puzzle in this book.
2. The material from Pam Barnhill’s free Advent Morning Basket over here.
3. Two Christmas picture books a day from my list over here, and Sarah Mackenzie’s list here.
4. Our only non-Christmas item is Connor Boyack’s American History textbook which just came out.
5. We’ll keep listening to the Action Bible, a chapter a day. I got the hard copy book last summer while thrifting. What a great treasure find! I’m counting that as Christmas-y since the first story of Christmas comes from the Bible. We listen to the book in Audible while we look at the pictures.
6. A story a day from a Christmas storybook that I got at Deseret Industries years ago.
7. A few factoids, a poem, or some other tidbit or trivia from the Christmas Almanac, shown above.
8. We’ll continue with a board game a day, not necessarily Christmas themed. My 13 year-old-son and I are currently in the middle of the missions for the game called The Initiative. Each mission lasts about 15-20 minutes, with 16 missions and more post-missions.

Want more morning basket ideas for Christmas? Here are some videos below, and something to read here. If you don’t have much money to spend, never fear. You can find lots of Christmas trivia and folklore videos on YouTube, ideas on Pinterest, and books at your public library. Happy homeschooling and Christmas morning time to all!