I woke up to this sign today. All throughout the house there are the signs that Christmas is almost here. Almost every room has someone in it working on a “secret” project or cutting snowflakes to decorate their rooms and Nick has taken charge of stringing the popcorn for the tree. So much to do and so much fun to do it all. We will not stress about how much there is to do, there is time. Christmas for us is all about making room in our hearts for the infant Jesus to be born and giving him the only gifts that we can. The only thing the infant needs, our love for each other. And so (yes, I know you shouldn’t start a sentence with and) I will declare this week “making merry week” and invite you to visit us whenever you can in the next couple of days as I may have more than one post per day.
Today, I am working on a project that I have tried to make a part of our Christmas for the past few years. Three years ago I went out and bought some fabric to do it and it still didn’t happen. Last year I added some fabric to that pile and nothing. This year, I decided that it was going to happen and added quite a bit of fabric selections to the pile. For about 6 years I have been trying to talk the kids into going paperless (or almost paperless) in the gift giving department. We have used fabric gift bags for birthday presents since my big kids were little but for some reason the thought of not ripping and shredding paper on Christmas morning was so sad to them. Until that is, I myself realized that those fabric gift bags would become part of our every Christmas, our heirlooms.
I told them to think forward 10, 15, 20 years and imagine looking back to see the different fabrics from each year. How special! We all agreed that this was stellar and no one was sad about it anymore, they are in fact excited about it. There are lots of kiddie fabrics (love me some Peanuts) and some vintage looking ones and some just downright Christmas-y fabrics that I am zipping up into bags of all sizes. Every year I will add a few along with a hand embroidered tag of the year they were added to our pile, sewn onto each bag. Our hope is that when our children start their very own families, they can take a few to start their own piles and remember the love that we share during Christmas.
The kids wanted me to label the fabrics I bought in 2011 and 2012 as such so I am doing tags for three years and this year being the first will have the biggest selection of fabrics. Most of the fabrics were purchased at Joanns or online and I have left the selvage edges on the ones that say where they came from because someday that too will be cherished information.
The wool yarn ties are Cascade Magnum Wool, bulky, Ecru. They remind me of the ribbons my momma would put in my hair when I was little.
I hope you are enjoying the last few days of Advent. Until we see each other again, I am off to make merry.
