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Do you remember the holidays when you were a child? How everything started at Thanksgiving with the family gathering and hope for snow to soon start falling. I remember running around with my cousins and sitting at the kids table. It was a magical & fun time.
As children my brother, sister, and I would all make lists of all the wonderful and newest toys that we wanted, we promised to be good and often tried really hard too! Once the decorations started going up the magic only increased. The smell of the fresh cut pine tree was always the first thing because every year no matter what we had a real tree and never a fake one. We’d all go out to a local tree farm and walk around until we found the perfect tree and then my dad would cut it down, the following day we’d bring it in the house and begin to decorate it.
The twinkling lights, the shiny bulbs, and decorations that were made with care in art class at school all went up on the tree. It was never one of those perfect show trees and to this day I’ve never had that kind of tree! Shortly following the tree the stockings and all the other decorations would go up around the house. It was all so beautiful and even more so as a kid!
We’d watch all the great Christmas shows & cartoons that we patiently waited for each year! To this day I watch every single one of them with my kids! And I don’t know a person who doesn’t like them!
As Christmas eve approached the excitement grew! We’d leave out cookies & milk for Santa, which he always ate, and carrots for the reindeer. Now, my kids leave cookies out as well, but sometimes instead of carrots they’ve left reindeer food that they’ve made in school. I hear the reindeer really like the oatmeal & glitter mix a lot more than carrots!
Even now, as an adult there’s magic in Christmas. I love watching the building excitement in my kids as it gets closer to the big day! Every Christmas Eve we leave the tree lit all night as we wait for Santa and then once the kids are all tucked away in their warm beds upstairs we start pulling out the presents and stacking them around the tree. Slowly our living room transforms into a Christmas wonderland! Afterwords I even find it hard to sleep the night through! It’s so exciting waiting for the kids to wake and come down in the morning!
My favorite part is when they come down and see all the gifts & the stockings filled to the top. I can hear them looking around excitedly, poking at all the gifts as they figure out which one belongs to who. It’s so much fun to listen and then pretend to sleep when one of them comes to wake us.
It really is magical! What is your favorite part of the holiday season? Is it still magical for you?
