Before you are thinking : No, please not another posting advent calendar this year! don’t worry I won’t be doing that again. Not that I would not have enough to say to post on a daily basis 🙂 but I really haven’t got enough time for this at the moment,

But I would still like to officially switch to Christmas mode. I guess when you have children it is easy to go back to the excitement of this particular time of the year.

How do you celebrate Christmas and the time before?

We have our advent calendar hanging from the railings of the stair. I guess I should make new bags. (Every year, it annoys me that actually I haven’t got as many green as red ones.) Each morning, they can open one bag from the bottom. When we have reached the top of the stairs it will be Christmas 🙂

Each morning we light a candle on our advent wreath and sing a few songs. Usually rather Christmassy ones. But my three year old sees a candle and sings Happy Birthday 🙂

For those who are not familiar with this tradition: There are four candles (sometimes one has a different colour), and each sunday in advent (waiting time before Christmas) you can light one more. Yesterday was the first sunday,  so we will always light just one, until next Sunday, when the second one will join.

We will now be waiting for two things to happen, on the 6th, Nikolaus (much more bishop looking than Santa Claus) might be passing with a few tangerines, gingerbread and nuts. In Austria he would probably pass in person and talk to the children about their behavior in the past year, here in England he is just passing very early in the morning and leaves his presents on the balcony. (I guess, as he has to rush to Austria, visiting everyone there 🙂 )

And the second thing to wait for is obviously Christmas. We will get presents on Christmas eve already. Brought by Christkind (baby jesus but not baby looking, rather like an angel, I think. I have never seen it, really. It is very shy and flies off with all the presents if you would ever make an attempt to see it).

To make this waiting time more exciting, I have started to decorate the house, starting with the window display. Remember I used to have flowers in there and lately I was wondering what to do with them as they get damp now in Winter. (I must admit, on the first morning with a wet window I tried to give them a blow dry). They would not have survived the whole winter. So the christmas posts by the twisted yarn came in handy and I stole adapted her idea of a knitted wreath.

I used two green wools held together to get a more “real” variegated tone for the actual wreath. As you can see (if you look closely), I had to cheat, I did not join the ends as it would be far too small (I was running out of the super chunky yarn). The red ribbon has been knitted by my daughter using her knitting fork and the bow is made by me. I am very pleased that we have finally been able to make a project together.

I love all of thetwistedyarn’s ideas for Christmas knits (and they are all perfect Scrap Sunday projects too 🙂 ) so I might make a few other things, depending on my time really. But that wreath looks a bit lonely, doesn’t it. So we will see what time brings. In the meantime, enjoy your Christmas preparations.