Christmas Traditions

I love hearing about different family Christmas traditions. Being married for a little over 3 years, it's been fun beginning our own traditions. Now that we have kid in the home, it's going to be especially fun making Christmas traditions for our little family. One tradition Trey and I started our first Christmas together as a dating couple was buying an ornament together. We now have 6 ornaments from our 6 years together. Every year I look forward to pulling out the ornaments, putting them in order, and reminiscing about our memories for each ornament and why we chose that particular ornament. Today, I'd like to share with you our special ornaments.

2006: We bought this first ornament at the Dallas-Symphony Orchestra. Someone gave Trey tickets to the DSO Christmas concert, so he took me there on a fancy date. This was our first Christmas together, just a few months after we first met in August at SWBTS. I've tried to find a picture on my computer of that date, but I can't find any.

2007: This was our second Christmas together, and we were engaged for this Christmas. For this year we bought a glass-blown fish ornament. The reason we bought this ornament is because we used to always make fish faces at each other. We did our fish faces differently. I will include a fish face picture to illustrate.

2008: Our first Christmas as a married couple!!! I must say, our Christmas tree looked a little pitiful this first year (Charlie Brown Christmas? Yes, please!) because we literally had only 4 ornaments total (someone had given us one for a wedding gift). When I said something about this at work, though, a few people pitched in and gave us some more ornaments. So we had maybe...10 ornaments that year?

2009: This Christmas was both rough and beautiful. We lost Burke (my sister-in-law's husband) in a car accident a week before Thanksgiving, then Trey and I had a miscarriage three weeks later. It was certainly a painful Christmas, but it was also so beautiful knowing the Lord and experiencing Him through this loss and tragedy. We had our ornament made in memory of our unborn child. We named him Bennett (we were too early to know the gender), which means "Little Blessed One." How much more blessed can you be than to go straight to be with the Father in Heaven?

2010: I was in the 2nd trimester with Kate for this Christmas! Oh how the Lord restores us from the ashes. After the heartbreak of our miscarriage, it took us a while to get pregnant again. But this, our 5th Christmas together, was one of celebration. God had granted us new life! We found out "it" was a girl (Kate!!) the week before Christmas. What a joy it was to know our daughter was being fashioned in my womb while we celebrated Christ's birth that year.

2011: And now we come to this year, our 6th Christmas together. We have a "baby's first ornament" for Kate, but we wanted to keep that separate since we will give it to her someday (a long, long, time from now!) when she moves out to start her adult life :). I made this ornament in MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) and we decided it would be our ornament for this year. It's a simple little ornament with Kate's cute little baby face inside. I'm going to cut up one of her birth announcements into little strips and put it in the back, too. (thanks for the idea, Jenny Graves!). This Christmas is our first as parents. What better ornament than one of our precious baby girl!