I am so excited to be putting into posts many of the things that I have found to work well with Christmas and college/adult children. It has been a definite learning curve from eleven years ago when our first child was married to last Christmas with our first grandchild.
I was used to Christmas revolving around our home. Yes, we did a lot of outreaches (specifically to disabled adults in the Fort Wayne area each year through One Heart’s Special Deliveries), and yes, we spent a lot of time with extended family. (Our children will respect and love their grandparents to the extent that we parents respect and love our kids’ grandparents!)
But our December focused on Christmas with the family. It began immediately following Thanksgiving with unit studies every year over Christmas traditions, Christmas literature, cooking/baking, Christmas music, and more. (Loved those unit studies every year!) And we had so many traditions throughout the years—and we were always together! (If you have read or listened to us much you might remember that we had a family rule of three or four nights each week minimum together as a family. This made December even more special.)
So to wean away from many of those traditions (and now to not even have a child at home during the day!) has been challenging for me.
The good news is that these traditions have stayed with our children, and they love them and want to keep many of them as adults coming back home.
So….how do you go about doing Christmas in a super close family with seven kids seventeen to thirty-three and four children-in-law—when you were used to doing tons of stuff and doing everything together?
That is what I hope to show you through this series.
Maybe you are just now starting to have kids away at college—and it will be many years before you are “empty nesters.” You can still benefit from this series as the dynamics definitely change when kids come home for college break vs. being there all the time.
Maybe you are just looking for some cool things to do with tweens and teens—we have some great ideas that our olders love.
So join us for the next couple of weeks as we delve into these concepts. 🙂
Thanks for being a part of Raising Kids With Character and Character Ink Press!
