Christmas Musings: 24 Books for Advent

I have to admit that in the last several years I've really lost that "magical" Christmas feeling. As a kid it was amazing of course, but as I got older I became rather disenchanted with Christmas and the crazy consumer culture that exists around it. I don't like accumulating "stuff" just for the sake of it and I really struggle with the idea of making up Wish Lists filled with things I don't need.

I've noticed this year though now that the boy-o is old enough to have at least some idea of what's going on I'm a little more excited about Christmas than I have been in past years. We've decided to start a new "Advent Calendar" tradition with the boy-o and rather than opening a cheap cardboard chocolate calendar window every day, we've decided to wrap up 24 books (some of them books we already had, and some of them new ones) and every night before bed the boy-o will get to unwrap one to read as our bedtime story that night. There will be one book for each of the 24 days, with the 24th book being "Twas The Night Before Christmas."

Most of the books are winter or Christmas themed but not all of them since we used some books we already had mixed in with some new books. Next year we'll by the second half of them so that they're all winter/Christmas themed. After the 12 Days of Christmas are over we'll put the books away again to save them for Advent next year. We're all big fans of reading in our house, and the boy-o loves books, so this seemed like a perfect way to keep that excitement about books going for as long as possible!