O Christmas Tree

Please note...no ornaments below the halfway mark of the tree...poor poor tree!

Last year, I was too exhausted to try to get everything together for Christmas. So no tree, no candles in the window, no Christmas music, no baking, nothing. This year though, Samuel and I are having a ball with Christmas!

I started our family tradition this year with celebrating St. Nicholas Day on December 6th. St. Nicholas Day is a European holiday that I learned when I was living in the Czech Republic, and since we have Czech roots I thought it would be a great time to teach Samuel about Christmas traditions around the world.

The legend goes that if you set your shoes and stocking out on the night of December 5th, St. Nicholas will visit the home of good boys and girls and leaves gifts. If you wake up and find stones and coal in your shoes and stockings, then you know you haven't been on your best behavior, but still have a few weeks to pull it together for St. Nicholas arrival at Christmas!

On December 5th, we prepared our tree for St. Nicholas pending arrival. Samuel, as you can imagine, was a HUGE help! I was happy to have a tree again this year since we didn't have one last year. Our tree theme this year is Pittsburgh Steelers! It looked lovely with lights, ornaments, candy canes. I was quite proud of our lovely little tree.

A half hour later, the ornaments were removed from the bottom half of the tree when I realized that Samuel wanted to use them as baseballs. So now our poor tree only has a few ornaments at the top! Oh well, it's a lovely tree and Samuel LOVES it! We plug it in every morning and Samuel loves to sit by the tree and "read" his books!

Of course Samuel has been an excellent boy this year, so there was no surprise when on St. Nicholas Day morning there were gifts for Samuel! He loved unwrapping the gifts and playing with the paper.


Samuel received a Christmas shirt, a Christmas book, Gingerbread Robeez, and a sweat suit. We had a wonderful St. Nicholas breakfast...Samuel was able to eat eggs for the first time with no reaction!!! That's a gift in itself! We finished decorating and preparing for Ho Ho Ho...now if Samuel would only not want to play with all the wrapping paper!