Tag Archives: traditions

Dear Tired Mom Who Wonders If All This Christmas Fuss is Worth It

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We took the kids to look at Christmas lights tonight. Me, my sister, our husbands and our children. It was gonna be GREAT. I imagined a quiet stroll down Peacock Lane and pictures in front of the Grinch house. Yeah. It didn’t exactly go down like that.

I don’t know why, either. I used to go to Peacock lane with my grandparents when I was a kid. I remember it as nothing less than perfect.

I won’t lie to you. There was some sibling bickering in the car on the way there. A certain four-year old was bothering her brothers by singing Christmas carols … off key. Someone ate someone else’s candy cane. On and on it went. Someone was cold. Someone was hungry. Someone had to go potty.

The street we love to visit was crowded… BUT.  “We are MAKING MEMORIES!!” I told them—and so out we all piled. A few times along the way, we had to stop and take a head count. It wasn’t relaxing. Two of the kids told me they would rather be home. (Yeah. And I would rather be “here” with you, listening to you bicker when I could be home taking a well-deserved hot shower?)  But I digress.

Here’s the reason I’m telling you the WAY IT IS. This parenting thing you’re doing—it’s not going to be easy. I’ve been at it now for going on 24 years. In my 24 years of parenting, I can testify to the fact that there are precious few “picture perfect” moments of family life. As moms, we live and breathe for those moments. Someone please. Just tell us that it’s not for nothing. We just want to know that it’s working, this investment of time, love and energy we’re making.

We wonder why we’re trying so hard. Is all this fuss really worth it? Why are we making sugar cookies and watching “Miracle on 34th Street” for the fifteenth time? The kids don’t seem to appreciate it. Even my husband is doubting whether or not anyone cares.

Is it that important?

I’m here to tell you that it is.

One day, your children will appreciate the fact that you made them stand in front of that wooden Grinch cutout for a family picture. Not too long from now, they’ll understand the sacrifice you made so that they could have a few traditions to share with their own families. Blink, and your teens will be young adults who will cherish those pictures that  they argued with you about taking. I told myself that again tonight.

We need to let go of this idea that things have to be like something out of a Better Homes and Gardens layout. Your turkey doesn’t have to turn out just right and you don’t have to have a hundred presents under the tree. Your kids don’t need a bunch of presents that they won’t remember in a month and that you can’t afford—but they do need YOU.

Christmas comes just once a year. I say “make a fuss.” It’s the birth of our Savior. It’s worth the fuss. It’s a chance to get out from under our daily routine and be thankful. It’s a chance to give back.

In this Internet age, this age of screen time and Facebook, Christmas offers us a chance to step away. We can step away, look at some Christmas lights, watch a few old movies and while we’re doing it, we can assess where we’re going and what we’re sowing.

We are sowing, after all.

So yes. The fuss is worth it. You’re trying so hard because of love. Love builds something. Love imagines a memory five years from now and sees it as precious in the moment, too. Love says, “This matters.”

Real Christmas memories are made on nights like tonight.

Or at least, I keep telling myself that—no, my grown children remind me of what I need to know to keep going… the little ones, the tweens, the teens… they will get it.

Come to think of it, I have a hunch it was hard on my grandparents when they took us to see the lights on Peacock Lane. It’s just that I don’t remember the fuss. I only remember the feel of my hand in my grandmother’s gloves. I remember Grandpa telling me how hard it must be for Santa to get all the way up to some of those chimneys. I remember hot chocolate.

I bet we argued. I bet we spilled our hot chocolate. I bet my grandparents fell into bed and wondered if it was worth it.

So, when I think about them, yes. I believe it’s true.

The fuss—is worth it.

Merry Christmas, busy mom.

St. John Family Favorites: Thanksgiving Books for Families

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Yes!  Leaves are falling, candles are lit. Cider abounds.  Bring it, holiday season! This year, maybe more than ever, I’m ready for some good old fashioned holiday rest and love. 🙂

I’m a little bit of a fanatic about Thanksgiving—because it allows us to be thankful for what we have without the pressure of gift exchanges. Thanksgiving offers us the chance to focus on what really matters in this life. To slow down. To reflect.

To be thankful.

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10 Favorite Winter Picture Books and Ideas for Enjoying Them

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 I love studying winter and all things SNOW with my children! There are so many fun ideas and fabulous books floating around out there. I wanted to share a few of my favorites here with you!

Favorite Winter Picture Books

  1. The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
  2. Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
  3. When Winter Comes by Nancy Van Laan
  4. Winter: An Acrostic Alphabet by Steven Schnur
  5. Snowballs by Lois Ehlert
  6. The Jacket I Wear in the Snow by Shirley Neitzel
  7. Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton
  8. The Big Snow by Berta Hader
  9. Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett
  10. Sugar Snow by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Each of these books ALONE could be a whole unit study! But, if you’re hoping to read one great book each day and do a few activities, that would work, too!

Have you taken a peek on Pinterest lately? Whew. That can be a tad bit overwhelming! So, I found what I think are some EASY and FUN activities and crafts to do with your children while you are learning all about SNOW.

Favorite Snow Crafts & Activities

Snow Snacks

I hope you find some inspiration in this post! Don’t forget to GET OUTSIDE and ENJOY the winter weather. Even if it’s cold, I encourage you to get outside even if for a few moments. Nature walks in the winter afford many different lessons that you can’t gain in the summertime! And, no matter where you live, whether it gets super cold or never snows at all, there are bound to be some differences in the weather that you can discuss with your kids!

Maybe you’d like to memorize the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with your children! This is the perfect poem for January!

Happy Winter, busy moms!  What is your favorite winter weather activity?

Read more from Candace and follow her in her Author Box below!

Forgetting Thanksgiving:The Nightmare Before Christmas

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I went to the mall on November 14th this year. It made me sad. And then—then it made me mad.

Christmas is here, apparently. Santa’s got his chair all ready to go. Ornaments hang cheerfully from the mall ceiling. Christmas songs are playing.

As I looked around, I wondered:  What happened to Thanksgiving? Where are the decorations for Thanksgiving? Where are the pictures of Pilgrims and Indians?  I miss Thanksgiving with the Walton family. Forgetaboutit. It’s time to buy more stuff. Everyone’s talking about Christmas. The sales. The glitz. The sparkle.

Thanksgiving doesn’t sparkle. It has a softer glow about it. Thanksgiving offers a quiet peace. Thanksgiving offers time to reflect and to be thankful–and heaven knows we need more of that these days. I wonder if we’re forgetting Thanksgiving.

Here in my neck of the woods, we roll Santa out right after the mummies go back into storage.

Is it happening where you live, too? Every year,  Christmas decorations go up earlier. Every year, we hear less about this cherished tradition of giving thanks. Bring on the gift giving. Americans like to GET things—and in the process, we’ve allowed ourselves to forGET that it’s better to give than to receive.

I don’t know about you, but I want my kids to know the history behind Thanksgiving. I want them to know about Squanto and the Mayflower. I hope they realize what those Pilgrims came here for. They came for freedom.

I want them know that it Thanksgiving would have disappeared altogether if Sarah Hale had not petitioned no less than five US Presidents to make it a national holiday.

In Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving by Laurie Halse Anderson, we see a glimpse of Sarah Hale’s spirit. She wrote persistently to officials in many levels of government promoting the observance of Thanksgiving as a unified national holiday. Not a woman to take “No” for an answer, Sarah kept on writing.  For four decades and five Presidencies, Sarah wrote. She believed that observing Thanksgiving was a way that we, as a nation, could be unified. In October, 1863, President Lincoln, perhaps in response to an editorial Hale had published in the magazine she edited, read a Thanksgiving proclamation to “fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

Read her amazing letter here.

We’re missing it if we miss this special time.

But then, we’re missing a lot of things in the United States these days.

Forgetting Thanksgiving, or even side-lining it, is a big mistake.

But then, we’re making a lot of mistakes in the United States right now.

We’ve got to get this right.

I want my children to look forward to gathering around the table at Thanksgiving. I want them to remember seeing their grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and neighbors bowing their heads in reverence and gratitude to God. I want them to learn that being thankful for what we have is better than getting things.

When I’m gone, I hope my grandchildren remember that their Mamsi loved to cook a turkey just right for whoever would come and enjoy it with us. I hope they still watch “Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving.” I hope they will tell the story of Thanksgiving to their children. I hope they’ll read Sarah’s story to their own children.

To me, Thanksgiving is sacred. There was something almost magical about driving through town to grandma’s house as a child and noticing that every.single.store. was closed to honor this special day. We took a break. We played games. We ate food. We listened to the stories of our grandparents—and we learned to give thanks.

We’ve got a nightmare before Christmas in this country when we forget Thanksgiving in a rush to buy more things and hurry past it to the “most wonderful time of the year.”

To forget is to miss out on the blessing.

Let’s remember. Let’s stop shopping for one day and give thanks to God for all we have.

Yes, it’s just one day, but it’s no ordinary day.

Take time. Slow down. Look up. Look around. Be thankful.

What are YOUR Favorite Thanksgiving Traditions?

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Thanksgiving_Traditions

 

We love Thanksgiving at our house. Love.

To my family, Thanksgiving is simple—and wonderful. It’s

  • All the wonderful, warm fuzzy feelings of the holidays—without the stress of gift giving—WIN.
  • A chance to remember Thanksgivings from long ago  (otherwise known as children talking with grownups)
  • Food. (cray cray, I know)
  • Cousins (the more the merrier)
  • Neighbors (invites go out every year)
  • More food.
  • Movies
  • Games
  • Books
  • Slow cooked apple cider
  • Christmas music (starts on Thanksgiving evening)

Peanuts_ThanksgivingAnywho—the kids and I have put together a new eBook that’s brimming with time honored, family recipes from The Busy Mom writers, traditions, a Thanksgiving devotion from Firmly Planted Family, craft ideas, book suggestions, printables, templates for my favorite family tradition and more!

It’s almost done…

But before we finish it, we thought it would be fun to ask you, our readers, about your favorite Thanksgiving traditions.  Do you have a simple tradition that really makes Thanksgiving memorable?

 

Talk turkey and {simple} traditions with me—leave your comment below!
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Family Fun at the Beach

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Summer is here and many families are spending time at the beach. I’m not a fan of the beach myself, but my boys are beach bums! Living in Florida means that it’s beach weather for most of the year, and I try to get my boys out as often as I can.  I had so much fun sharing things to do at the park with your kids that I thought I’d do a list for the beach.

Family Fun at the Beach

5 Things to do with your Family at the Beach

1. Nature walk: Yep can do this at the beach as well. Walk along the shore and the sand and look for animals.  Consider doing a morning walk, an afternoon walk and an evening walk and notice the difference in what you find. Or a high tide walk and a low tide walk! We usually find hermit crabs, small fish and seagulls on our walks. And every now and then we are blessed with a dolphin or manatee sighting.  Just be sure to watch out for jellyfish, they sting!  (Take pics of what you find if you can’t collect it, then identify it in a nature book when you’re back home!)

2. Collect sea shells: There are many different kinds of shells at the beach. Take some time to collect some as you hang out on the shore. You can start a collection, or use the shells to decorate by filling glass containers, scattering them on window sills or decorating picture frames.  You can also make charts and graphs of the different animals, sizes, colors and shapes of shells you collected.

3. Build a sand castle: Every year around summer time I take my boys to the dollar store to stock up on buckets and shovels for the beach.  We are not very skilled at sand castle construction, but we have a lot of fun trying. I learned that the trick to getting your castle to stand is to use wet sand. My boys have fun collecting buckets of sand that we pile in rows and columns to build our kingdom. We also use some of our sea shell collection as decorations.

4. Pick up trash: Sadly, the beach can be covered with litter. I like to take a few minutes before we head home to pick up any garbage that we see on the sand and near the water. Especially be on the lookout for those plastic soda rings those are very deadly for the sea animals.

5. Have fun! Get out there and splash in the water with your children. The waves can be a ton of fun. My boys like to be thrown into the big waves when we are at the beach. I can’t pick them up anymore, but I can gently push them into the water.  Be willing to do something you might not enjoy for the sake of making a memory with your children. It’s worth it!

BONUS: Many of us like to gather books to read before we go to the beach, so you’ll be familiar with what you see while you’re there.  Here are some of our favorites:

Those are just a few ideas of ways to have fun with your family at the beach. We usually spend an entire afternoon/late evening in the sun. I pack lunch/dinner, snacks and lots of water.

What are some of your favorite things to do at the beach?

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Heidi St John Guide to Daylight

An Invitation To Dinner

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Hospitality @thebusymom.com

“The heart of hospitality is when people leave your home, they should feel better about themselves, not better about you.” Shauna Niequist 

I’m an introvert through and through. I’m the last person that should be giving hospitality advice. So, I won’t. I won’t give you advice. I will just share what God has allowed to happen in my home and in my heart recently.

Over the last 6 weeks we’ve been blessed to have several families into our home. This picture below was preparation for one of those evenings.

Look at this picture of my non-Pinterest-worthy table setting. Look closely at those chairs. They don’t match. They’re old. Their stained. For a split second I found myself thinking, “What am I thinking? I don’t even have enough chairs at this table for everyone that is coming?!” 

But, thankfully, God intervened.

My not-perfect table @thebusymom.com

I think it is no accident that we learn of hospitality in the book of Acts, the earliest of churches.

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer…Everyday they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.” Acts 2:42, 46-47. 

They met at the temple, yes, but they also met regularly in each other’s homes. All Scripture is God breathed and useful…the writer of Acts mentions that they met in homes for a reason. And I think that reason is just as vital today as it was in the days of the early church.

But, hold up…wait a minute…I know what you’re thinking. My house isn’t big enough! (Mine, either, actually!) My chairs don’t match! I’m not a good cook! (Me, either! In fact, I hate cooking so much recently that I wrote a post called 20 meals for moms who hate cooking!) I just don’t know about this. I’m just not cut out for this.

I’m with you. I hear you. And here is what I want to tell you…

Take a chance. Do it anyway. Call a family and invite them over for dinner. Just do it. Take a risk. Step out of your comfort zone and bless another family. You don’t even have to cook, actually! Have pizza! Order Chinese! The point is not the food.

I can almost guarantee you will be thankful that you did. Do you know why??

We need each other. 

To be quite honest, we need to see each other’s homes in all their non-Pinterest glory. We need to see the crumbs on the floor. We need to see that there are others out there that don’t dust weekly. We need to know that not everyone has matching dishes, coordinating everything and a family chef who does all the cooking. {pssst… if you have a personal chef, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.} 

Hospitality is not about making your house look good so that others can be impressed. Hospitality is about letting people into your not-perfect home and your not-perfect life so that you can bless and encourage one another.

We need the fellowship, the encouragement, the memories, the conversations around the table more than we need the Pinterest-laden kitchen full of perfect recipes and coordinating dinnerware.

“Hospitality is not about inviting people into our perfect homes, it is all about inviting people into our imperfect hearts.” Ruth Soukup

So, busy moms, what are you waiting for? Don’t try to convince yourself that you’re too busy to invite a friend over for coffee or a family over for dinner. Don’t talk yourself out of a blessing!! Go ahead! Who can you call this week?? I encourage you to go for it! You won’t regret it!

And if, like me, you tend to overthink everything and will try to talk yourself out of this, speak this truth aloud to yourself: My friends want to come over because they want to spend time with me and my family, NOT because I have a perfect home or a perfect table setting. It’s the truth, I promise.

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Heidi St John Guide to Daylight