Christmas Nativity

When I was a kid, we made these marrionette puppets in our church primary class. They are puppets of the Christmas story. My Mom was in charge of the whole project & we spent a few primary activities creating these puppets. At Christmas time we did a presentation of the First Christmas story. We did it a few times over the years throughout my childhood. The puppets have been safely packed away for at least 15 years. This year my Mom pulled them out & got them all repaired. We did it with the kids this year on Christmas Eve. We used the book This is the Stable by Cynthia Cotten as our narration. It's a sweet & simple story. It was really fun to do it again & it brought back some fun memories from when I was little. I tried & tried to post the video of it, but blogger kept failing on me... maybe in a day or so I might try again. It's cute!

We also have a Nativity book that we've read every Christmas Eve since I can remeber. It's a book my aunt put together & my Mom has made one for each of us as we've gotten married for our own families. It has pictures, songs, & scriptures telling the story of the first Christmas.

We had a nice, but chaotic Christmas this year. The whole family came into town. It's always fun seeing everyone. The kids always have a blast playing together. It's fun for us adults to hang out together as well, talking, cooking, shopping, etc. This year was crazy because of the intense amount of snow we got. We spent most of our time inside. The kids were very happy with all the Santa brought. Elsie had no trouble figuring out what to do with presents. I was, too. I have eaten myself sick in the last week. I don't know why I do that to myself, but it happens every year. As fun as it all is, It's always nice when things settle down after Christmas. We got our tree put away already & it feels so clean.

Here are the kids opening their pajamas on Christmas Eve.