CHRISTMAS IS COMING

49 Days Away!

The stockings-

A tradition beginning in a European country originally, 

children simply used one of their everyday socks, 

but eventually special Christmas stockings 

were created for this purpose

The Christmas Tree-

decorated real or artificial, and 

a Christmas tradition

The Door Wreath-

Christmas decorations 

symbolizing the coming of Christ, 

aka the Advent season in Christianity

The Snowman-

They are customarily built by children

as part of a family project in celebration of winter

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Some of my Christmas memories:

We grew up in a Swedish family

and celebrated Christmas Eve with a 

large family gathering and the 

exchanging of family gifts

after we ate dinner

The dinner sometimes consisted of

a Swedish Smorgasbord

My grandmother would say the 

blessing in Swedish.

As kids we never really knew what

she was saying, but boy did she say it well!

There was corn pudding, Swedish meatballs,

lutfisk - fish in a jar (yuck), limpa bread with lingonberry jam,

dates rolled in powered sugar, bread pudding,

scalloped potatoes and chicken,

sauerkraut, and other family favorites

One of my mom's favorite sayings

was: "But we have to feed the people"

With 6 kids in our family

we had a massive amount of

gifts under our tree

The youngest kid usually

was appointed "Santa"

to pass out all the gifts to everyone else

Some of us other kids would usually

get up and help Santa

Christmas morning found our gifts from 

Santa under the Christmas tree.

I remember so clearly the little hand written

signs with black marker with our names

on them. They were large signs and were

placed in front of our "pile" of gifts from Santa

(Of course it was my dad's writing on those signs)

Santa never wrapped up gifts for our house

(our parents were too pooped after 

wrapping all the family gifts that 

were handed out on Christmas Eve).

Christmas day would be a little 

bit slower paced and end with 

a nice ham dinner

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Are you ready for Christmas?

What are some of your family traditions?

remember:Jesus is the reason for the season