My Family's Christmas Traditions

Every year we go to the "Festival of Lights" on downtown historic Main St. All the stores stay open late, the high school band is playing Christmas music, hot apple cider and fresh popcorn are on hand, or you can choose to show up early and have a wonderful dinner in one of the the many restaurants gracing Main St.

Davey "Doc" Wiser gives free stage coach rides for hours all evening. We, without a fail, always make it a point to take the little ones on it! My daughter Willow Rae was entertained by the horses especially this year, now that she is old enough to really know and understand everything that is going on (she will be 3 soon).

After we ride the stage coach, we go and see the "Tree Lighting Ceremony." There is a huge old tree right across the way from the court house that gets wrapped in lights and lit all month long on this special night!

Most of society right now is trying to push God out of our country. A lot of people are trying to say that He doesn't exist! But He does, oh ho ho, He does! And a lot of people are trying to push Jesus out of the Christmas celebrations.

Christmas is the celebration of Jesus' birth, even though He was born in the month of Nissan (Jewish calender, March-April). He was born in the Spring, however we celebrate His birth in winter. This is because the Catholic church changed it over to coincide with Yule, a pagan holiday.

However, this does not take away from the fact that Jesus has been the reason for this season for hundreds of years!

He is the reason we celebrate Christmas.

... And they love a woman who is crafty in the kitchen! When my husband David and I were engaged, I expressed to him my doubt in cooking. I had never made an entire dinner before, I had just done prep work for my mom, or side dishes. I had baked cookies, but nothing else.

However, once we were married and I was left to a clean kitchen needing to be messed up with dishes to be cooked in for dinner, I got crafty! I more often than not left the cookbooks on the shelf and turned to the internet for dinner recipes. Especially if I was in a squeeze. Many times this scenario has happened to me, with many other meats, but I will use ground beef as an example...

It is 3:00PM and I have forgotten to take a meat out to defrost to make dinner with! So I open up my freezer and pull out ground beef. I am so not in the mood for Meat Loaf, or Stroganoff. I cannot simply look up "ground beef" recipes in my cookbooks, they don't have that section! But, I can go to my friend google, and type in "ground beef recipes" and man do I suddenly have thousands of recipes at my fingertips!

Another very special holiday we celebrate around the Christmas season is Hanukkah. I don't recommend this holiday for everyone, just Jews and Christians.

Why would a Christian celebrate Hanukkah?
Well, think about it...
Christians believe in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.
Christians believe the whole Bible is the Word of God. And God used Jewish men to write the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.
Christians celebrate pagan holidays without knowing it... Why not celebrate a holiday that worship's God?

We celebrate Hanukkah to get our family more focused on God. Hanukkah is a holiday in which we remember a miracle from God.

After the Maccabees fought and beat Antiochus and his armies, they returned to their temple. Their temple had been robbed and was thrashed, and there was only enough oil to last them one day. But God extended this oil enough for one day, to last them 8 days! Hence why there are eight candles on the menorah.