Traditions! Traditions! Old and New Traditions!

All of us have many precious traditions that we look forward to sharing with our families each year at Christmas time. We have several. Many that are service oriented like our 12 days Nativity. Some that are just fun and have originated over the years almost by accident, like the rabbit hunt that Karl and the kids go on while I wrap presents or do other things that get us closer to being ready for that special day. Our most popular and favorite tradition so far is our Christmas Story tradition. Each year we wrap up a Christmas book and then on Christmas Eve we open the gift and add it to our previous years Christmas books. Then we stay up reading our books until we can't keep our eyes open any longer.

This year has been BY FAR and away our most memorable Christmas yet. We added two new traditions to our holiday season. Both of them added to contribute to our Christ Centered Christmas. One was simply a Jesus Tree. This tree is covered in white lights and ornaments that remind us of Jesus. The next new tradition will require a little explanation.
To introduce the other new tradition to our children, we bent our Christmas Story tradition just a little. We let the kids open the Christmas book for this year about 3 weeks early. The book we gave them this year is called, The Last Straw. I read this book at the end of the holiday season last year. I felt impressed to purchase it right then and put it away just for this time. I didn't fully know what I was going to do with this book but I just knew we needed to have it in our family. After our decision to not have Santa visit this year I continued to think about how to make our Christmas just as magical and fun as all the other years. As I was thinking about this I remembered this book. I pulled the book out and read it again. I love the idea of the serving combined with the giving of Jesus a gift. I started to pray about how I could add this to my families Christmas.
After letting the kids open the book and after reading it we presented our family with a Jesus Gift. It is an empty box with a slit in the side. We then told them that it was empty right now but we hoped to have it filled by Christmas morning, when it would be the first gift we would open because it was Jesus's birthday. "Well what are we going to fill it with?" My children asked. Karl and I explained that we were going to fill it up with secret services that Jesus would love! We talked about who Jesus would love to see them serve (anyone) and told them that each time they did a 'Secret Service' they could go to the Jesus Tree were the box would be hanging, fill out a slip of paper that explained what they had done, fold up the paper and put it through the slit! Their eyes lit up! And so began our most memorable Christmas ever and it's not even over yet! It has been a joyful experience.
The other day Jax and I went walking into his room, he stops, gets wide eyed, and says, "Wow mom! Was my room this clean when you came in here just a minute ago? Some one did a secret service!" He was so pleased and it brought joy to my life and his and whomever did the service. Since that day I've heard, "Hey someone did a secret service!" Exclaimed joyously many, many times. It has been a joy for me as I myself have hurried to do a secret service without getting caught. Can you imagine my joy when my youngest daughter came in and said to me that she would like to do a secret service by taking some bread to her singing teacher who had just gotten home that day from the hospital, where she had had a baby, and would I help her make it? We have all had little notes of love found all around the house. And a few of us still have some secret service surprises up our sleeves before the holiday season is over. I think we are going to reach our goal of having our box filled before Christmas morning and I can't wait to open it up and see who did what kinds of service!

Before ending this post I just wanted to share some photos and a couple videos of our pre-holiday moments!

Karl and the daughter of our very good friends share the same birthday, Dec. 12th. So we had a little party for the two of them. It was a lot of fun.

I have such cute children! We found Luke was fine with sitting on Santa's lap as long as there was someone in between him and that big bearded guy!
This is our Jesus Tree it really is quite pretty. The Jesus Gift is hanging on the other side. Karl forgot to take a picture of it. I will try to get one and post it later.

Jax had a great time putting lights on our one lonely tree in front of our house.

This is our regular Christmas tree with our cat laying under it. She is so funny every year she loves to hang out under the Christmas Tree.

Just another family tradition of decorating the tree.

Even Luke helps!

We had the opportunity to return the visit of our friends and visit them in Eagle Mountain. It snowed a lot that day and Kenzi, Missy, and Jacelin had a great time playing in it!

The girls are in a singing group and here they are hanging out with some of their good friends.

This is a picture of their whole group and the videos I'm going to post are of each of them singing one of their solos.

We hope you all have a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!

We love you!

Our Christ Centered Christmas

Today I received an answer to a silent prayer I have been offering for some time now.
Let me explain. Karl and I have had the feeling for several years now that we should take "Santa" out of Christmas. He has become so commercialized and very few people really stop to think about what he represents. This is sad but obvious. The commercialization of Santa has become a tool that Satan uses to create greed in the hearts of men. It is always amazing too me how Satan takes so many good things and uses them to actually become exactly opposite of what they represent. It's so sad.
This year we decided to go with our feelings and let our children know that we were going to have a Christ Centered Christmas, no Santa. At first they were a little surprised. They were worried that they wouldn't get "lot's of fun stuff" for Christmas. This confirmed my thoughts on Santa creating greed, because my children have never been what I would call greedy. They have never been the type to write a long list of things they want, and their response to Santa when he asked what they wanted for Christmas was always: "I don't care, I know I'll like whatever you bring me."
They are still a bit unsure about Christmas without Santa and I have been also, but I just kept getting this overwhelming feeling that this is what we needed to do. Then today I was reading in my May 2008 Conference Report Ensign and read Sister Lant's talk "Righteous Traditions". I had an overwhelming feeling of peace as I read these words: "The most important traditions are connected with the way we live our lives and will last beyond us as our children's lives are influenced and shaped. What kinds of traditions do we have? Are they what we want them to be? Are they based on actions of righteousness and faith? Are they mostly material in nature, or are they eternal? Are we consciously creating righteous traditions, or is life just happening to us? Are our traditions being created in response to the loud voices of the world, or are they influenced by the still, small voice of the Spirit? Are the traditions that we are creating in our families going to make it easier for our children to follow the living prophets, or will they make it difficult for them?"
As I continued to read my Heavenly Father again spoke peace to my heart through Sister Lant as she said: "Our efforts must be toward hearing the interpretations of the Spirit rather than the understandings of the world."

As she asked this questions towards the end of her beautiful talk: "Will their hearts and lives be full of traditions that make it easy for them to accept and follow the Lord and the latter-day prophets?" my heart was gladdened to know that the Lord approved of what we were doing with our family because we could, in regard to this tradition, shout "YES!"

I'm so thankful for the tender mercy of my Father in Heaven. He, despite His endless work, granted me a knowledge of His acceptance of our actions, and gave me peace in knowing that He approves of us striving to put our Lord and Savior at the head of our Christmas season.

Talents, Halloween, and, to top it all off, a road trip!

I have the wonderful opportunity of serving with my friend Amy as the Activity Days leader for the girls in our ward. Kenzi is in activity days for a few more months and so I also get to enjoy the activities with her as well. A couple of weeks ago we had a Talent Show. It was a great experience for the girls to bring a talent to share and explain their talent to us. I was AMAZED at the amount of talent in our girls.

As you can see from the picture above we had six girls attend.

We had three different musical instruments played for us, Kenzi sang and brought her prize winning stories for display. We had scrapbook pages, sewing, baking, and art projects!

These girls are sooo talented and so blessed and they blessed our lives by being willing to share their talents with us. I have a video of Kenzi singing but it is too big, I need to figure out a way to make it smaller and then I will post it.

Now for Halloween!

We had a mixture of characters as you can see....

No agreeing on a theme in this bunch, well okay, Luke didn't have a choice or he might have sided with Jax. Raggedy Andy is my very favorite boy costume we own so he didn't have much of a choice. The ONLY thing I like about Halloween is dressing up. However, I have to admit, that it was funner when they were younger and I pretty much could just choose what was cute and help my mom make it! Luke really didn't hate his costume as much as you might guess from all his pictures. He had just woke up, was HUNGRY, and we were in a hurry to make it to a trunk-or-treat, so he was ticked that we wasn't getting food right now! Once he got to eat he was great and left his wig on the whole time. Can you guess what Kenzi is? Well maybe I'll tell you when we get to the individual pictures if you haven't figured it out by then. Oh I'll just do that with the other two as well. LOL Because they aren't obvious.

This year we had a Halloween party. It was the day after Halloween but it was still pretty fun. It was a family Halloween party so I let each of the kids pick a family to invite and we had fun games that we played in teams of families. Below are the decorations. Yep, none other than our creative little Jacee girl, (speaking of talents) made them. Oh, with the exception of the paper lantern you see in the picture below. We bought that and the pumpkin garland.

Pumpkin carving was great this year! I had play practice so I helped get the pumpkin carving going and Kenzi and I had to leave (DARN) LOL just kidding. I actually enjoy carving but not the mess! Karl had to carve Luke's pumpkin below. Luke quickly lost interest.

Jax's (bet you couldn't guesss!) pumpkin turned out great. He did it all by himself!

Kenzi's turned out way cute. She also did hers all by herself.

Jacee's looked cute but she insisted on having help! LOL She didn't want to ruin it! How funny, aren't we already ruining the pumpkins? LOL

Luke, loosing interest!

OK, here's my little Sacajawea with her papoose, of course!

Ok, he's not just a solider! Do you give up? Come one think Jax?

OK, OK

He's SPECIAL FORCES! LOL

And you probably won't guess her completely right. Kenzi is a country singer!

Go Figure!

Below is a picture of our wrap the mummy relay game. The object was to pick a person in your family, wrap two rolls of toilet paper around them and send them across the room. The first one to the other end of the room is the winner!

The winner was the Jesperson Family!

Way to go! You look very mummyish Emily!

Next on the game list was, hmmm, what was the name of this game.

Ummm, Throw the candy corn in the cup. Whoever has the most candy corns wins the game.

As you can see from the picture the person wearing the cup felt a little insecure! LOL

Thanks to Trevor of the Gunderson family, the Fausett family won that game. Trevor enjoyed packing the candy corns and putting them in the Fausett family cup. LOL

Next was Hot Potato Laundry Bag.

We passed around laundry bags full of dress up items if the music stopped while you were holding the bag you had to draw something out of the bag and put it on.

These were the results:

The Fausett Family

The Jessperson Family who tied as the winners of this game! Love, love, love, Mark's get up!

The Gunderson Family

The other tied winners of this game!

And lastly, the Kraync Klan

Lastly my kids had begged to have a silly sting war so I bought each child a can of silly string and they had a great time out back shooting each other with string! Below is a picture of Mason covered in silly sting.

We had a great time at our party!

Thanks everyone for coming!

We were pleasantly surprised when my brother Chad brought his family and came home for the weekend. It was so great to see them. Below are some pictures of their family. Jax and Kyler were fighting. It was pretty funny. Kyler is a little toughie! He is soooo funny and dang cute!

Here is a picture of precious Tanner with Jacee and Chad.

We had the opportunity to go on a VERY LONG road trip with Karl. We went to Casper Wyoming, through Vernal then back down to Rifle Colorado and home through Grand Junction, Colorado, 1200 miles in all! Here are some pictures of the things we saw on our way! The rainbow was beautiful. Full and bright. We could even see where it ended. In fact the end of the rainbow followed us a long way. I didn't get a picture of that end of the rainbow but it was beautiful. It was a double rainbow also. I couldn't fit them both in the camera.

Just a cute picture of Jax chillin' and Gracie having a nap.

OK, here is what I learned or should I say remembered as we were driving to Casper.....

I never want to live in Wyoming! LOL No offense to anyone who HAS to! LOL

On our way back from Casper headed to Wyoming we stopped at Martins Cove. We were the only visitors there. It was cold and we didn't stop to go on the trail but just to let mom and dad look at the visitors center and find information about camping here next year and doing a Trek as a family.

The deer were so pretty and only about 15 feet away from Jacee for this picture.

Elder and Sister Thomas!

Do these guys look familiar to any of you?

Probably not but they did to us and it was sooo good to see them. Sister Thomas served as my first counselor in Primary in our Wellington Ward. I just love these two people. I admire them soooo much. I cannot say enough good about them. I knew they had gotten called on a mission here but I expected them to be gone by the time we got there. Last I heard they had only been called on a 6 month mission. But, to our pleasant surprise they had been asked to extend their mission for another year so they were still there when we stopped. It was a sweet blessing to get to see them.

LOL, what is this?

It's not Halloween, Just Gracie being played with, or in her thoughts, tortured.

I thought this was a sweet protrayal of my two middle children actually getting along for a brief moment. They are cooking pasta over the campfire. LOL I know it is taking the self suffcient thing to the extreme a little but they loved it! I will have to remember to get pictures of my dad and Jax and the fishing. Then you will wonder about us and the self sufficient thing! LOL