Our Little Christmas Elf

I'm not a big Christmas enthusiast, but my son is. This is the first year he's really understood what Christmas was and been able to anticipate it.

He's been wanting a Christmas tree since Halloween. So on Sunday, we went to a Christmas tree farm and cut one. He enjoyed cutting down the tree and was pretty excited about decorating it. We let him put ornaments wherever he wanted them, which meant we ended up with a couple of clumps of ornaments down at the bottom of the tree.

Normally Vinny wakes up after the sun rises, but on Monday morning he woke up before dawn because he remembered that there was an exciting Christmas tree full of lights to see.

I have other plans for him, including making Christmas cookies and a gingerbread house. I'm also thinking we might take him to a Christmas concert -- my workplace is offering discount tickets to the local symphony orchestra's holiday concert.

He's excited about Christmas and wants to know how much longer it is until Christmas every day. I thought about getting him an Advent calendar to count down the days until Christmas, but I didn't think it would really help him understand how much longer it was. A colleague of mine suggested doing something that his dad did for him -- create a paper chain where each of the links represents a day until Christmas, and then tear one off every night. I thought this was a great idea -- it's a graphic illustration of the length of time remaining.

I wrote the date and the number of days remaining on each link (e.g., Wednesday, December 2 [23]). I included the days of the week because he is starting to catch on to the days of the week. He knows that Saturdays and Sundays, Mama doesn't go to work, and he's learning the order of the days. He is really excited about the chain and it gives me something to point to when he asks how much longer until Christmas.