Advent Season, Part IV – Family Gift Plan

I wanted to try something new with gift giving in our house this year.  I had two goals:

1.  More time together during this busy season.

2.  Spread out the gift giving instead of one big morning.

Overall, I wanted to slow down during this overly busy season and RELAX more with my kids.  I wanted to build some memories of fun, family times instead of busy, hurried mom trying to get a ton of stuff done.

We decided to begin a week ahead of Christmas and have five special days that would include a bonus “family gift”.  The gift would be something that we could do together to enjoy one another’s company and we would open it together.

Because we added a few extra gifts, we decided to eliminate the stocking gifts.  Instead of purchased gifts, our stockings were filled with letters, pictures, and notes to one another that we worked on throughout Advent season.  The kids enjoyed creating these as well as opening them on Christmas morning.

I saved all of the notes in page protectors for each child.  I hope we will continue this and add more pages each year, keeping a special notebook of  letters written each Christmas.

We started our family gifts 7 days in advance, knowing that life might interfere on one or two of the days. 

Family Gift One – 12/18 – Toy Story Three:  We waited until C’s naptime on Saturday afternoon and then gave the older three kids this DVD.  We popped popcorn and watched it together.  Of course, this gift was the first reminder that things don’t always go how you envision them.  As soon as the kids opened it, T (age 6) declared, “that movie scares me,” and refused to watch it with us.  So she played in the other room and peeked in every now and then.

Family Gift Two – 12/19 – CADOO (by Cranium):  I had gotten this game for $5 at a yard sale and saved it for Christmas.  This worked out well because my parents had taken D (age 3) to be their Advent helper for the day, so we only had the big girls once C was in bed.  We played this game SEVERAL times.  They loved it.  We spent an hour and half on the floor laughing and having a blast.  This was one of my favorite days!

Family Gift Three – 12/21 – Puzzles:  Sadly, because of our busy evenings, Eric missed out on this day because we did it while he was at work.  During C’s naptime, I gave each of the older three a brand new puzzle.  D received two circular floor puzzles I had gotten for $1 at a yard sale which were AWESOME!    T (age 6) got the Mary Cassatt, “Children playing at the beach", puzzle to add to our Fine Art Puzzle collection.  K received a Fancy Nancy 100 piece puzzle.  We had a nice afternoon doing puzzles on the floor together.

Family Gift Four – 12/23 – Drawing books.  I purchased two new drawing books for the girls, “How to draw people” and “How to Draw Pets”.  I grabbed our former “easier” versions for D (age 3) off the shelf.  We spent the morning drawing on the floor together.  C (18 months) just walked around and played with the camera, but the older three had a blast trying out their new techniques.

   

Family Gift Five – Flashlights.  Then plan was to give each child a new LED flashlight and take them on a surprise evening walk.  Unfortunately, we had two things working aganist us.  First, the weather was BITTER cold the entire week.  SEcond, we were putting batteries in the flashlights and realized that they were so bright that they kids would completely blind one another.  I am talking SCARY bright, with NINE LED lights in each flashlight.  So, Daddy made a Christmas Eve morning run to find “safer” flashlights.  Because of the delay, we didn’t get to use these for a family fun gift, we just tossed them in their stockings.  We just laughed about it that night and had to throw in the towel on the flashlight idea.  But now that the temperatures have gotten milder, perhaps will still take an evening flashlight walk for fun.

Overall I LOVED this way of doing gifts.  It DID NOT replace Christmas morning, but gave us a new way to enjoy gift giving.  I hope we continue it in some form in the future.  It’ll probably be pretty simple to come up with a movie each year (or maybe even go to a movie together); find a new family board/card game; and one or two other ideas.  I think that we achieved our goal of more time SLOWING down and spending time together.