Blue-Footed Musings

The weather’s not looking so great for the next few days. The forecast for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is heavy rain and high winds, with the possibility of power outages and/or flooding. I hope Santa knows that all I really want for Christmas is for the trees not to fall, the power to stay on, and no flooding!

We mailed our Christmas cards today. It’s late for sending cards, and most of them (if not all) will arrive at their destinations after Christmas. But, the cards say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas,” so as long as they arrive before the New Year, that’s fine by me.

Ordinarily that would be given, but not this year. Packages sent by USPS are running really late. I know this not only because it’s been reported in the news, but also because the present that I ordered for my dad back in November has not yet arrived. Every time I check the ETA, it gets later and later (it’s now up to December 30). I hope the regular mail is moving faster than that, because I would like for people to get their cards before Valentine’s Day, but I’m not going to fret over it. I have better things to fret over.

I didn’t do much today. Aside from the Daily Minimum, the only thing I did, and the only thing I felt up to doing, was to arrange a Christmas present exchange with my parents. It wasn’t as much as I should have done, but at least it was something. If all goes as planned, everyone will have a few more presents to open Christmas morning.

It’s the 19th day of the 2020 Virtual Advent Tour, hosted by my friend Sprite at Sprite Writes. For my day of the Tour, I’m going to talk about my Advent calendar. I grew up with the paper type of Advent calendar that was popular when I was a kid during the ’70s. I probably would have bought something similar for my kids. But, before I got around to it, I happened to mention to my mom that I’d seen some cute Advent calendars with little drawers for holding gifts, and next thing I knew, I was the proud owner of this:

Isn’t it great? There’s only one problem: the drawers are tiny! Nothing bigger than a couple of Hershey’s Kisses will fit inside.

I didn’t want to give the kids chocolate every day, though. By the time Advent rolls around, they’re just coming off their Halloween sugar high, and the last thing they need is more candy. So I had to come up with another solution.

What fits best, I eventually found, are messages on paper folded up small, and that’s how our Christmas Tickets came to be. I make the Christmas Tickets on my computer. Each one is an invitation to a family activity (game night, movie night, a Christmas craft, etc.), or a coupon that can be redeemed for a special treat (cocoa, popcorn, etc.), or the first clue of a treasure hunt leading to small gifts (new Christmas ornaments, books for story time, etc.). It’s a lot of work, and sometimes I struggle to come up with ideas that suit both them and me. But the rewards are that it makes the children happy and that we spend a lot of time together as a family.

Because this isn’t the way my parents celebrated Advent when I was a kid, it’s not a family tradition. I guess you could say it’s a new tradition. It may sound like an oxymoron, but I can’t think of anything better to call it. Anyway, I like this new tradition. I hope that when my kids grow up they will look back on it fondly, and maybe even make it an old tradition.

How about you? Have you created any new holiday traditions for yourself?