holidays

I love Christmas.  One of the things I love most is that it is celebrated for an entire month.  I love the time of preparation and the focus on Christ’s birth.

But without Easter, Christmas truly is meaningless.  As awesome as it is that God sent his only Son to earth, it is only the first part of the story.  His death on the cross for our sins and the fact that he rose from the dead 3 days later is what gives not just this story, but every life story purpose and meaning. 

And yet it seems Easter gets so little of our focus.  Sure there are Easter baskets and egg hunts, and egg dying and beautiful spring dresses (none of which have anything to do with the true meaning of Easter) but all of that takes place pretty much on Easter. 

I don’t see much preparation and focus for Easter like I do for Christmas.

This year I am going to try to be intentional and spend focused time as a family preparing our hearts for Easter.   I want to carve out some time each week to bring out focus on the cross and on His resurrection.  

So, I’ve done some planning.  I’ve pulled out the Easter board books from the overstuffed bookshelf in the kids room, and plan to set them out in the living room in a basket for the kids to look at and for us to read to them over the next month. 

I am planning one craft a week for the entire month of March that focuses on Easter.  My hope is to make things we can then use as decorations around the house.  I’m going to do a paper mosaic of the cross with the kids to hang on our wall the first week, “some stained glass” (tissue paper) window hangings for week two, and I am still hunting down an idea for week 3 (any suggestions?) For week 4, I bought these coloring books from CBD.com (at $1.49 each, I got one for each kid) and we are going to work that week on coloring in the pictures and retelling the story.  And on the week of Easter we are going to make resurrection cookies.   I also bought this book which has some mazes, connect the dots, and other paper projects we can work on throughout the month.

I have a set of resurrection eggs, which I have used in the past, but not really.  I haven’t gone through them day by day with the kids like they are intended.  This year, I have it on the calendar.  We will start on March 24th and do one egg each day, thus retelling the Easter story for 12 days leading up to Easter. 

By Good Friday, I hope that our family will be prepared to truly worship and grieve our sins at the Good Friday service at our church that evening.  It is my favorite worship service of the year, as it is such a precious time of meditation and reflection of Christ’s death on the cross, but in such an intimate and personal way.  Saturday we will most likely have an Easter egg hunt with both sets of grandparents and dye eggs with them as well.  (It’s become a sort of tradition here to do that on Sat with the grands and it always a ton of fun).  In my opinion there is nothing wrong with Easter eggs, it’s just not what it is all about.  And Sunday, we will worship our Lord together as a family at our church as we celebrate His resurrection. 

It is my prayer that by making Easter a month long celebration, we can all more fully internalize the true meaning of not only Easter, but of our life.  We were created to bring glory to God and without comprehending the depth of our sin, the sacrifice of the cross, and Christ’s conquer of death as he rose from the dead, we can’t truly bring Him glory. 

My prayer for my family this Easter is taken from Ephesians 3:16-18.

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, ¹⁹and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Do you have any Easter traditions, crafts, ideas, you’d like to share?  Please share in the comments below.  I am always looking for new ideas to incorporate here at the circus and would LOVE to hear from you!

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As I was looking over the pictures we took on Christmas Day in order to make my collage, I commented to Scott that it appears I wasn’t there for Christmas morning as I couldn’t find any shots with me in them. 

Then I realized I was wrong as I spotted this picture.

Whew…. good thing I was wrong… there is photographic evidence of my existence at Christmas 2009. 

The next day when the family gathered again for our more formal dinner, Scott rectified the situation by snapping this lovely picture of my backside.

Hmmm…perhaps I was better off when there was no photographic evidence of my existence!

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Megan is hosting her annual Sharing Christmas carnival where bloggers can invite their readers into their homes for a sort of Christmas Open House.   I tend to use the same decorations each year in pretty much the same locations and since I posted on those here last year, I am not going to redo the same post.   Instead I thought I would post on how things are different this year at the circus.

This year we did not get lights hung on the house.  We had very good intentions.  We were going to hang them up the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  And then we were going to cut our tree down on Monday afternoon.  Scott even took a vacation day from work.  But, I checked the weather report on Sunday and it was calling for rain on Monday.  And I decided if we only had one sunny day to work with, the tree was more important than the lights.  Scott attempted to go quickly up on the roof before we headed to the tree farm but the lights weren’t cooperating… as in we didn’t have enough strands of working lights.  And since we were short on time we decided to postpone that task and go for our tree.

Since Scott doesn’t get home from work till after it is dark, we are left with weekends to hang lights.  But, the next weekend it snowed… can’t get on the roof when it is snowing.  Weekend after that it rained.  And THEN this past weekend, it snowed.  So, yea, no lights this year.  We do have our inflatable nativity up though. And this year, unlike last year we have 2 ft of snow in our yard… way more magical than lights, right?

Another way we are different this year is that we haven’t done Christmas cards yet.  Yup, three days till Christmas and I have done NOTHING in regards to Christmas cards.  I used to LOVE doing Christmas cards and would start thinking about them before Thanksgiving.  But I’ll be honest.  Last year we got a few cards, ok newsletters, that made me weep.  Literally weep.  I read about all this stuff these moms were doing with their kids, or to be more accurate, I read what these kids my child’s age were doing and realized that I had been doing none of that with my child.  And I felt guilty and defensive and angry and like a failure.  “Merry Christmas,” huh?  Anyway, it made me think… do my newsletters paint some perfect picture that makes someone else feel awful?  And now that I blog regularly and post status updates multi times a day on face book, don’t all the people that want to know about my life know way  more than they care to about my life?  What more can I say?  And so, I haven’t felt like doing Christmas cards.   And for the first few weeks of December it appeared no one else was doing it either.  Didn’t get a card till mid December and I honestly thought, “Maybe no one wants to do cards this year?”  But, no, people really are sending cards.  On December 18th I said to Scott, “Guess I should start thinking about Christmas cards, huh?” 

It is December 21st and I’ve still got nothing.

I am thinking rather than stress out and throw something together out of obligation, I am going to work on something cute for New Years.  It’s my aim to send something out in January… perhaps a collage of photos from the year with a personal handwritten note at the bottom…sound nice?  This way people will know we’re thinking of them, I can pick some favorite pictures highlighting the year and I can do it during a month that has a lot less activity in it.  Hoping I can bring this idea to fruition. 

Lastly, we have a partially decorated tree.

I love, LOVE our tree.  I love the decorations, I love our star on top, love that we cut it down ourselves, love the way the kids bunch up the candy canes when they put them on the tree, and I love the cranberry and popcorn strands on it. 

Make that strand.

Scott and I started stringing cranberries and popcorn in early December… around the 3rd I think.  Hung up the first two strands and were going to get to it the next night.

Hmmm… I am hoping we finish before the fam all comes for Christmas morning.  (in 3 days) I have no excuse except for laziness.

I guess, if you wanna know how this Christmas is different at the circus, I’d say it is a lot more relaxed.  I’ve had a wonderful December.  We’ve gone to parties, we’ve seen the parade of lights in Annapolis, we walked around at midnight madness, we’ve snuggled on the couch and watched movies, we’ve built and decorated a gingerbread house, baked and eaten cookies and played in a record breaking snowfall.  We’ve made many, wonderful memories. 

And the other stuff? 

I’m not sweating the other stuff. 

So, that’s Christmas this year at the circus.  Thanks for stopping by.  Please stop by Megan’s for a chance to take a peek inside some other bloggers homes this Christmas!

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