Christmas To Do List Ideas - Oksana
Hi Everyone! My name is Oksana. I am a wife and mama to three children. Noah is 9, Emma just turned 6 and Ava is 13 months old. I am a stay at home mother and most of my time is spent raising my little crew, schooling them and doing life together.
I wanted to share a bit of my background since I haven't talked a lot about it. I am Russian by Nationality, was born and raised in the former Soviet Union. I went to University when I was 16 and that’s when I started to learn the English language. I absolutely LOVED it and couldn't get enough of it. Little did I know, that was going to travel to Canada after I graduated from University where I met my future husband who is from the US. We got married in the autumn of 2005 and I immigrated to the United States in march of 2006. I love my life here and proud to be a citizen of this amazing country I get to call home.
Fast forward 10 years, we are now a family of five and I'm all about about doing things together and forming our own family traditions that I hope our children will cherish and carry on in their own families. And what better time to build family traditions than Christmas!
One of my favorite things we do this beautiful holiday season is to get our own ‘choose and cut’ Christmas tree. We usually do it the day after Thanksgiving and travel to a Christmas tree farm in the mountains of North Carolina. I dream and look forward to the day staring fall. There’s just something so special about it. This year was the first time with took Ava with us and it was just wonderful. She touched lots of trees, walked around them, played pick-a-boo and had fun. The weather was gorgeous and we couldn't have asked for a better day. We also found our perfect tree! I know she will not remember it but we sure have plenty of photos to show to her when she gets older.
My older daughter Emma wanted to get a small tree for her room. But she shares the room with her baby sister and it is a small space. To disappointment we couldn’t fit a tree there.
I started thinking how I could make her heart happy and came with an idea of a small ‘Christmas Tree’ wall hanging. We used branches from a cedar tree, made little swags from them, tied them with twine and hung from a stick in a tree pattern. She LOVES her little ‘tree’ and I am happy for her. It is very simple, doesn't take up space, takes about 30 minutes to make, yet brings her happiness. And that’s what makes my mama heart happy as well. I am pretty sure we will be making more of these in the years to come.
Next on our list of things to do in the weeks leading up to Christmas is to read lots of Christmas books. It is one of my favorite to read to my children, watch them flip through pages, look at beautiful illustrations and talk about the true meaning of Christmas. Emma is really getting into book this year, she is learning to read. And I think baby Ava is becoming quite a bookworm herself. She loves to walk around with books, turn pages and look at pictures. She comes over to us, plops down into our lap and gives us a book to read. It brings me and my husband joy to know our children love books.
And of course no Christmas season goes by without baking and consuming lots of eggnog. We bake gingerbread cookies for our advent calendar, sugar cookies, shortbread cookies, and this year we made rice crispy treats and cut them out into snowflake shapes with a cookie cutter. I love the slower and cozy days that this season brings and I hope my children will have warm and fond memories about all of this when they get older.
I want to wish a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New year from our family to yours!