Lilliput Station Online Christmas Party

I am the member of a Yahoo group called Lilliput Station. This group is all about homeschooling and has a lot of neat ideas for learning activities–mostly for young kids.  The address for this group is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LilliputStation/ . The group owner also has a blog where homeschoolers can share their ideas at http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/amtell . It is also called Lilliput Station, and I am pretty new to that site, but it looks like it is full of great things too!

Lilliput Station (the blog) is currently having a Christmas Party to celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is fellowship and drawings for prizes there, so I would encourage all of my homeschooling readers to check it out! As part of entering some of the contests, readers are asked to submit festivity contributions in one of several categories, and I am looking forward to reading some of the neat ideas that other people share for celebrating Christmas!

My own contribution is for the Decorations category. I want to highlight our family’s Christmas stocking tradition for this. I have written about it previously on this blog, but I am going to share it more in detail here for the others who are joining the Lilliput Christmas Party. I started this tradition in 1996, the year that Dan and I got married. I bought our first Prairie Family Christmas stockings that year and wanted to make them special. After a lot of thinking, I decided that each year I would make a button to symbolize something important to that family member from that year to put on the stocking. Then, each year when we got out the stockings, we could be thankful for all the many happy memories shared on them. The first few years I used fabric covered button kits to make the buttons. I used my computer to make iron-on symbols and then used the fabric to make the buttons. This was very tedious and did not always work well. So a few years ago, I bought a badge-a-minit set, and that has made this yearly project so much easier! I use the 1 1/4″ buttons. I made this slideshow to show the stockings after I put on this year’s set:

Make a slideshow - it’s easy!

Last year, I decided it was time to keep a written record every year of what each of the symbols mean. There were getting to be so many that we couldn’t keep track of it from year to year! So, I started a Microsoft Word file with that information that I update as I add new buttons, print off, and put in the box with the stockings when I put them away for the next Christmas season.

We started a new family tradition this year that has been a great success called a Jesse Tree. I wrote an entry describing it at http://colbylobrien.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/2007-jesse-tree-ornaments-2/ and posted an update on how much my kids are enjoying it at http://colbylobrien.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/jesse-tree-update-and-another-idea/ . The Jesse tree has done what I wanted it to do: keep our focus on the True Meaning of Christmas, and I would encourage all of you from the Lilliput Party to check it out. There are pictures and instructions (including links for printable ornaments!) in those entries.

Merry Christmas to all of my regular readers and to my fellow Lilliput Station friends!