More traditions

Many families do the Santa thing.  When I was a child, I had learned that Santa had morphed from St. Nicholas and I knew that story.  But one year, my mother sewed Dad a Santa suit.   At my one room schoolhouse, we had a program for our parents and during the program, Santa appeared!  I thought, "My parents lied to me!  Santa IS real!"  But when he came to give me a gift, I saw the twinkle in his eyes and knew it was just my Daddy!

In my last post, I mentioned the tradition of how our family acts out the Christmas story.  That is the REAL reason for Christmas!

 Well, we do a little of the Santa thing too.  The grandkids just LOVE it!  Year after year!  After we act out the story, Papa says he has to go to the bathroom and he somehow slips out and gets dressed in the costume and appears at the door.  He hands out the stockings to everyone, then leaves.  Then Papa comes back to the room and pretends that he missed the whole thing!

A couple of years ago, the kids just followed Papa around to catch him in the act of changing into Santa.  "We KNOW it's you, Papa!"  So last year, we had our neighbor, Jeff surprise them and come as Santa.  That year, Papa didn't miss out!  We wondered what to do this year.

The kids were following Papa around, trying to make sure they could get him "going to the bathroom" to change.  But guess what?  Another Santa came!  (S)he came up the stairs with a

  HO HO HO! 

 And this Santa could speak Japanese!  Good thing because the gifts under the tree were labeled in Japanese!

What a delightful time we had with the gift giving!  We went youngest to oldest.  The person would pick out what gift they wanted to give away.  They would have to come to Nana to read the name in Japanese, and then they would give that gift to the person.  Sometimes, it was their own gift, and then they'd have to get a different gift because it was the giving that was important!

 

Bet this is the first time CSLewis  books were wrapped in princess wrapping paper!

 We gave the children some books.  A series from the Institute of Creation Research.  And this book.

 I've always thought it would be so neat to write a series of books for children about missionary kids around the world.  I was so glad to meet this author one day at our Christian book store and get her book!

The children gave us a few homemade crafts!

Claire wanted to help unwrap everyone's gifts!

Presents were put to use right away!

It didn't take too long to build his x-wing!

The very sad thing for us this year was that since Mindy changed job positions, she could not get the same time off as Josh's family.  Mindy came with her boyfriend Jason for Christmas.  We had dinner and they opened gifts from us and we did from them.  

Then we got a call that Josh's were on their way home from a ski trip to southern Colorado but a snowstorm was forcing them to return through Kansas instead of through Oklahoma so they were able to stop in for a couple of hours!  Not enough time for us to do the whole Christmas thing, but it was just enjoyable to be all together and for them to be able to meet Jason too.  

A cute gift that Mindy's gave to the grandchildren.

And then, Christmas was over for us in the first week of January.

These girls helped me undecorate.

Until next year!