I got my Immanuel Wreath to replace my DIY one! We’ve been enjoying it the past few weeks! I love reading the names of Christ at the base, one below each candle, and reading the accompanying scriptures. If you want to learn more about it, read here. We lit it all up last night. The effect is stunning! I just love looking at this wreath of light as I ponder on the source of all light, our Savior Jesus Christ.
My Christmas gift to you today is this video below, all about the character of Christ, by one of his Twelve Apostles, living on the earth today, Elder David A. Bednar. It is so beautiful. I testify what he says is true. Watch and listen and bask in the joy and the peace of the Holy Spirit that accompanies his words. I rejoice in the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. Because of Him, we need never walk in darkness. He truly is the Life, Love and Light of the World.
Merry Day before Christmas everyone! I’m just popping in because I can’t let this day pass without mentioning a remarkable historical note. Did you know that today, Christmas Eve of 2022, marks the bicentennial, or 200 years, since Clement Clarke Moore wrote the world famous poem “The Night Before Christmas”? Little did he know, on Christmas Eve, 1822, as Mr. Moore wrote his poem, which was an early Christmas/bedtime gift for his children that night, that it would become a classic. Maybe even the most well-known poem in the English language? At least among children who speak English? I learned about the date he wrote it by reading aloud the above charming picture book, yesterday during our Christmas Morning (err…evening, since I ran out of time in the morning) Basket time. Then I did the math and realized, hey, it’s been 200 years!
The above book tells some history behind the writing of the poem. I enjoyed the book but was left wondering how much is true. Is it historical fiction? Or is it all true, like the story in the book of him taking a sleigh ride from his home in Chelsea New York to the tip of Manhattan Island to buy another turkey for Christmas Dinner at the Washington Square Market? I just love the map in the book that shows the route. The book tells the story, that as he took the sleigh ride to go shopping, he pondered what he would write to fulfill his promise to his daughter to write something to share with his children that night as a special surprise. In the picture book, he sees images that eventually become part of the poem, like a man in his nightcap looking out a window, a driver of his sleigh, who had ruddy cheeks, and a fat man carrying a sack over his shoulder. Unlike other picture books I’ve enjoyed based in history (like the picture book biographies I love over here), it has no author’s note, or backmatter, at the end of the book, to tell me. I’m so disappointed.
That’s why I’m SOOOOO excited that I got this picture book below from my public library’s interlibrary loan program. As God orchestrated it, I was able to pick it up yesterday, just in time to read it tonight. I requested it a few weeks ago. I’m so grateful it came in Thursday, and I was able to pick it up yesterday, as the library is closed today, on Christmas Eve. Nothing like getting a perfect picture book, about Christmas Eve, that tells of a poem written on Christmas Eve, to read on Christmas Eve, exactly 200 years later! This makes my homeschooling mama’s heart sing!
The book shown below tells the story of how the poem was written, according to the second great-granddaughter of Clement Moore.
Here is what goodreads.com says about it:
“In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore created the classic Christmas poem, ‘The Night Before Christmas,’ for his daughter. Here, in verse and accompanied by over 50 richly detailed illustrations, is the story of the writing of this classic. It is based on the history of the poem as passed down through the generations of the Moore family and told to the author by Dinghy Sharp, the great-great-granddaughter of Clement Moore. Not only does the story of the beautiful and enduring poem’s creation unfold in this tale, but many of the terms and actions of the characters in ‘The Night Before Christmas’ are explained, including why stockings were hung, why windows were shuttered, what coursers were, and what exactly sugarplums that danced through children’s heads really were. Perhaps most moving, is Moore’s motivation and inspiration for the creation of the poem. This lovely edition is a natural companion to ‘The Night Before Christmas,’ which is included in Moore’s own handwriting at the tale’s conclusion. This story is sure to become an equally valued part of the holiday tradition.”
Image Credit: goodreads.com
We will read this tonight as part of our Christmas Eve program!
I love that this poem, was a gift of a father to his children. (According to the picture book at the very top, Mr. Moore was kind of like Jim-Bob Duggar. His children were 7, 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1 when he wrote the poem. Whew! His wife must have had a housekeeper!) He wrote it to show his love. This fatherly gift continues to bring so much delight and joy the world over. (I remember my first grade class acting this poem out for parents and friends for a Christmas program. I was bummed I was assigned to be a boring top instead of a glamorous sugar plum fairy.) This gift of a father to his children has inspired countless versions and is a family tradition for many to be read aloud very Christmas Eve. He also paved the way for what most people think of Santa as: a jolly old fat man with reindeer who use a sleigh instead of a wagon. Just goes to show the power of a father’s love and pen.
Merry Christmas everyone! Be sure to watch the Studio C sketch down at the bottom of this post. So funny! It uses Poe’s poem The Raven but shows Santa’s visit on Christmas Eve, which has definitely been shaped by Mr. Moore’s poem.
You’ve probably heard or read about the idea of doing a Christmas Picture Book Advent. I started doing it years ago, when all seven of my children lived at home. After one year of wrapping 25 books, I was done. With the wrapping, that is. We still do Christmas picture books, one or two a day, more if I can squeeze it in, as part of our Christmas Morning Basket. I just pull them out and pretend that we just unwrapped them, haha. My lovely genius daughter, who is married with two little boys, came up with this great idea for moms like me who don’t want to wrap the books: gift bags. Why didn’t I think of that?
Being a minimalist, she loves the plain brown paper bags, as shown below. She embellishes them a bit with a white gel pen.
She just hangs them from string with clothespins. Then they aren’t accessible to curious little fingers.
She says you can get them on amazon, like here. Trader Joe’s has more decorative ones.
Even if you start this idea late, and/or don’t keep up with reading a book or day, or have more books than fit between December 1-25, it’s OK to be reading Christmas picture books after Christmas. I do it all through January as part of my “hygge homeschooling” or “hyggeschooling.” Here’s where you can learn more about that.
Dear daughter got a lot of book titles from me. I’ve been collecting picture book titles for years, especially for Christmas. You can get suggestions from lists I’ve created here and here.
The one she’s reading aloud below, however, is one I hadn’t heard of before.
It’s called Red and Green, Blue and White by Lee Wind, illustrated by Paul Zelinksy. It’s based on a true story of friendship between a boy who is Jewish and a girl who is Christian. I put it on hold at the public library the other day and can’t wait to read it. I invite you to read it too! Remember, don’t feel like you have to buy any of these books. Your local public library probably has a bunch. If you feel like buying them, don’t feel like you have to pay full price. Keep your eyes out all year round when you go to thrift stores and you will find many that way. Happy reading!
Did you know there’s a Christmas Eve tradition where you are supposed to stay up late and read books? It’s true! Go here to find out more!
I love me a good, cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie. You too? I recently found out one of my male relatives has a secret addiction to them. Hee-hee. I’m excited to trade notes with him the next time I see him, maybe on Christmas Day. I can find out all of his recommendations, and he can get mine.
But I’m not showing him the video above. When my son showed it to me on Thanksgiving Day, we all laughed out loud. It’s hilarious! The guy in the video is playing both the male and female leads of a typical Hallmark Christmas movie. Just a hint when watching: when he has the scarf around his neck, he is playing the female lead. It all rings so true! The above-mentioned relative wasn’t there, and his wife advised I not show it to him, as it might offend him. She said he’ll have to be in the right mood to appreciate it. So maybe we can catch him in the right mood on Christmas Day.
In the meantime, I’m having fun indulging in the cheesiness of these movies and using the above image to play bingo, even if it’s all mentally as I don’t really have time to sit down and watch the movies with hands solely playing bingo. At this point, so close to Christmas, it’s multitasking all the way (meaning I’m listening to movies as I wrap gifts or do other chores).
Anyway, this movie here, Trading Christmas, is the most recent Hallmark Christmas movie I’ve seen. It’s delightful! I highly recommend it! 5 out of 5 stars. It’s clean, funny, devoid of bad language, and the acting is great. I’ve got the whole movie below, but if that gets taken down, please see the link at the beginning of this paragraph.
Here’s the plot summary from the book in audio format, which the movie is based on, in everand.com:
“Emily Springer, widowed mother of one, decides to leave Leavenworth, Washington, to spend Christmas with her daughter in Boston.
“Charles Brewster, history professor, curmudgeon and resident of Boston, wants to avoid Christmas altogether. He figures a prison town should be nice and quiet over the holidays – except he’s thinking of the wrong Leavenworth!
“Through an internet site, Charles and Emily arrange to swap houses for the holiday. So Emily goes to Boston-and discovers that her daughter has gone to Florida. And Charles arrives in Leavenworth to discover that it’s not the prison town – it’s Santa’s village! The place is full of Christmas trees, Christmas music and…elves.
“Meanwhile, Emily’s friend Faith Kerrigan travels to Leavenworth to visit her and instead finds Charles the grinch. Then Charles’s brother, Ray, shows up at his home in Boston to discover that he isn’t there – but Emily is.
“Through all the mix-ups and misunderstandings, amid the chaos and confusion, romance begins to emerge in unexpected ways. Because everything changes at Christmas!”
It’s based on the book below, which I’m currently listening to in everand as an audiobook. If you want to learn about how you can use everand to listen to all the Christmas audiobooks you can, go here.
So far, the book is much better than the movie! As usual! I hope you enjoy both!
Here are some other fun Christmas romance movies I enjoy:
-Penny Serenade, this one is an oldie, but goodie, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. It’s not as flashy as the others, but it’s about marriage, trials, Christmas, and parenthood. Definitely worth watching!
-A Christmas for the Ages. There’s hardly any plot to this one, it’s basically pure eye and brain candy. The only movie I’ve ever seen that features four generations of female characters. It has Cheryl Ladd and Candace Cameron Bure’s daughter, Natasha Bure. Very cute, especially if you just want to relax and feel good and enjoy fashions from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1990s.
I read aloud this picture book a few years ago and loved it. I didn’t realize until I read it that eating tamales on Christmas Eve is a Latin American Christmas Eve tradition. I love it! I love having traditions, and traditions that involve food are even better. Come to think of it, when we lived in southeastern AZ my husband’s co-worker, who is Hispanic, always sent him home with a box of tamales on Christmas Eve. She was such a sweet lady.
Here’s a video read aloud of the book down below so you can enjoy it right away. So be sure to watch it and go put the picture book on hold at your local library.
Then here is a great story involving two missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Christmas, and tamales. It is such a sweet story. I just love it. It’s a wonderful story of love and sacrifice. I hope all involved are blessed and prospering because of their sacrifice.
Here’s the beginning of the story:
“I had about two months left on my mission in Costa Rica, and I was serving with an American companion, Sister Nguyen. We were excited to be celebrating Christmas and were preparing small bags of sweets and cookies to deliver on Christmas Eve to friends and families in the small city where we lived.
“I had spent most of my mission in very poor areas, and I was grateful. The Lord had blessed me by allowing me to teach people in humble homes, to live among them and learn of their kindness, their humility, and their spirit of sacrifice.
“The last family we visited to drop off some treats was the Carmona family, a large family that was one of the poorest in the ward. They all—parents, children, in-laws, and grandchildren—lived in a small wooden hut covered with sheet metal, lacking electricity and any other modern comfort. They were preparing traditional tamales that they would eat during the holidays…
If you want more Christmas stories, and if you are like me, you can’t have too many! I am obsessed with them, whether they be picture books or stories that stand alone in print with no illustrations.
Anyway, if you want more, go get my FREE family devotionals ebook here. Check out Christmas picture book recommendations here. Merry Christmas and God bless you!
Have you ever wondered how the holiday classic song Jingle Bells came to be? The author of this picture book above came up with a reasonable story about it. He took some historical license in guessing the details, but the license makes a fun story. It involves John Lord Pierpont, who was the music director of a Unitarian church in Savannah GA in the mid 1800s. I love that it shows how he fought racial prejudice and hate with a joyful song to lift the spirits of the congregation after being a target of those ills.
I read this aloud to the class of 6-7 year olds that I teach at my weekly homeschool co-operative. Every week my friend Stephanie and I like to do a picture book, a craft, and then free play for this group of cuties/rascals. This week, to go with the snow theme in the book we made paper snowflakes, out of coffee filters, decorated with washable markers.
The kiddos had a little bit of a hard time understanding how to fold the paper and where to cut for it to turn out to look like snowflakes. It’s hard for more than one to watch at a time. It’s like herding kittens! In the future I will show them a video first like this one above and maybe they can all see a screen better than my hands on the table. I’m thinking we will do this activity again in January and pair it with the Snowflake Bentley picture book. Then maybe they’ll get the hang of it. Some of their snowflakes looked like misshapen masks with barely recognizable holes for eyes and mouth, lol.
Anyway, this is a fun picture book and craft pairing that I recommend if you need a fun picture book and craft activity to do with kids, say ages 8 and up, without any help.
Here are some of the snowflakes I made below. I love that with coffee filters, you don’t have to do as much cutting as you do when you use 8 1/2 by 11 inches paper. Coffee filters are cheap too! A bag of 100 is less than $2. I and we in the class will be making more of these! This is something I’m adding to my January list of things I’m looking forward to, in order to avoid the post-Christmas letdown that I’ve sometimes had. I’m looking forward to filling up our windows with these.
I used paper plates for them to work on because I don’t have one cookie sheet each for 10 kids. I also used a spray bottle of water and heated them to dry in a 200 degree oven. That worked just great. Before I let them loose with the markers I pulled out all of them that weren’t blue, purple, or pink. You can see that the markers’ effect is this pale coloring that kind of looks like iridescent snowflakes reflecting light.
If you want more Christmas picture book and craft match-ups, go here.
Have you heard? A movie that tells the true story of why and how Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is playing at a theater near you!
Here’s a mini-synopsis told by Edward Hermann below, with music by the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.
If I were feeling ambitious, I would show the video above to a bunch of children who have a love of learning, and we would then make a bell ornament like over here (easy) or here (not as easy). Since I’m not feeling ambitious in that way, I’ll just admire the efforts of those of you who are.
I love learning about the stories behind Christmas carols and traditions. I hope you do too! A review of the movie is over here. If you want to read the backstory of the carol, go here.
As I mentioned in my blog over here, about my Christmas Morning Basket for homeschool, I am reading aloud two Christmas picture books a day to my son. Then during the rest of the day, I’m binge watching YouTube videos about Christmas picture books. Here are a few of my favorite Christmas picture books I’m loving this year plus a few videos to give you ideas for books, beyond my list over here. Christmas picture books give me such joy! I hope they give you joy too!
Note: some of the books mentioned are actually chapter books, not picture books. Also, if you want some short stories to read aloud to the whole family, check out my Family Devotionals Ebook in the December section.
Don’t worry about not being able to buy them all, just head over to your public library’s site and put them on hold, or request through interlibrary loan. If you don’t know what that is, then ask your friendly librarian. Reading picture books aloud to your children is the biggest perk of homeschooling. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done/continue to do for homeschooling (29 years and counting) and it brings me so much joy! If you haven’t discovered the magic of picture books, whether or not you homeschool, I invite you to start today! Go get picture books from the public library if you don’t have any at home, cuddle up on the couch with a youngster, yours or a borrowed one, and enjoy!
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:
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.
The material from Pam Barnhill’s free Advent Morning Basket over here.
Two Christmas picture books a day from my list over here, and Sarah Mackenzie’s list here.
Our only non-Christmas item is Connor Boyack’s American History textbook which just came out.
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.
A story a day from a Christmas storybook that I got at Deseret Industries years ago.
A few factoids, a poem, or some other tidbit or trivia from the Christmas Almanac, shown above.
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!
Tree of Life Mothering 