Celebrating Christmas Traditions

Some of the most meaningful gifts that I received this Christmas had a common theme of new traditions that would become part of our holiday celebration. This included Christmas tree and snowflake shaped pancake molds and silverware holders shaped like stockings that my mom made. Normally, these things wouldn't excite me, but, with the prospect of sharing these with our new family they were by far the most meaningful gifts we could have received.

Joel and I already have some of our own traditions. One of these traditions is buying an ornament when we are on vacation so that when we decorate our tree each year we can reminisce about all the places that we've been and things that we've seen. (Usually these are fairly eccentric, like sock monkeys and funky key chains from the days before we had real ornaments.)

One of the most incredible and memorable experienes that we've had this year is making the decision to adopt. We added an ornament to our tree in honor of our baby who has yet to join our family. It's a star ornament with intertwined beads in the center- a perfect symbol of the way that lives and histories become intertwined through adoption.

With excitement, we placed this ornament on our tree with the hopes that we'll be showing it to bambino next Christmas.