Christmas Tradition Fails

It was nice to have a Sunday to stay at home before the holiday festivities. I thought it would give me a good chance to try out some new traditions. First - the little girls and I bought some gingerbread kits two days ago - cookie ornaments kit and a candy house. But after church and lunch, the older kids went to take naps, as did Corey, and the little girls had a hard time waiting, so they didn't wait and it wasn't a family bonding/quality time "we're all together having fun" activity like I envisioned. The girls did their cookies and then nagged me the rest of the day about when I was going to do the gingerbread house with Dad. I finally just told them they could do it. They tried, it fell apart, and then Abi cleaned the kitchen and threw it all in the trash. So when I saw that in the trash I thought that was a stupid waste of money. I'm grateful she cleaned up... I'll let her know next time to save the gingerbread, but I guess I don't want to eat it, and the kids don't like it either. So, yeah, we won't be doing the gingerbread house again.

Another thing I've tried to do for atleast the past 3 years is to have the kids do service to each other during December as a gift to the Savior. After talking about traditions at church, a neighbor gifted us the book "The Last Straw" which is something that helped her kids do service. It's kinda like what we are trying to do. I read that with the girls this afternoon. I should have read it a month ago though, not on December 23rd. And we don't have a manger with straw.... we have a gold stocking that is hung up with their stockings, and they are supposed to write out what they do and put the note in the stocking, and then we'll read it on Christmas Eve. I never got around to telling them of this tradition again, it's just been if they remember it from the first year we did it. So I'm not sure how many of the kids know the game or have been trying to do service. I've written a few things I've done. We'll see when we read the notes tomorrow, if we do read the notes.

Another attempt at a new tradition was to watch "The Man Who Invented Christmas" with the kids. I loved it last year and it hit home and meant a lot to me. This one failed because, shortly after starting the movie, it became apparent to us that our children don't know what the Christmas Carol story was about. Doh, small detail... when the different ghosts kept showing up, they (mostly our vocal Ethan and Hyrum) were like "WHAT in the heck is going on?!?!" They didn't want to stop it though, cause the they didn't want to watch it anyway and so they just wanted to get it over with. I tried to explain it to the little girls, but they were fine to just let it keep playing, so we finished watching it. I still like it, but, again, it wasn't the heart warming "let me share the deep feelings and insights I had with this movie" bonding experience I was hoping for. After it was done, we tried to find a version of A Christmas Carol to watch. We didn't want their first exposure to be Jim Carrey or the Muppets... and then I remembered the one I watched as a kid had this "Thank you Very Much" song.

Which led me to finding and turning on the 1970 musical of Scrooge. Teens were complaining though, so we quit, and that's when I waved the white flag and told the girls to just make the gingerbread house. I went upstairs and Corey and I talked about the difficult to deal with attitude of our teens and how to have traditions with kids of such varying ages and abilities. (We concluded that basically it's impossible). Corey was making me laugh with his comments, saying that the older boys think they are doing us a favor by not vocalizing every snarky remark that comes into their brains. The toddlers are hard cause they take our full attention and then any efforts attempted with the older kids are thrown out the window.

A third attempt at a new tradition was to read the Christmas Story in Luke 2 and act it out. I told the eager girls to chose which part they wanted to play and to find costumes. That kept them busy, but we didn't get around to it cause Corey and I were done/spent. So they have their costumes packed and ready to use tomorrow at our family Christmas party at Uncle Mark's house. So we'll try that there. So 4 failed attempts at new traditions. And I didn't get pictures of any of those attempts. Corey did put Ethan in the hold during scriptures.

It's getting a bit more challenging to do, but Corey is still bigger and stronger than Ethan, for atleast another year maybe, we'll see. Well, so much for new traditions for our family. We'll try next year. Maybe.