by Betsy Pierce
Dec. 15, 2025
Welcome back! Come and visit more of my family’s Christmas celebrations! I hope they inspire you to copy or create your own. Food Fun: Gingerbread Houses and Cookie Factories One beloved tradition for our homeschooling group is when our family hosts Gingerbread House Decorating Day. Yes, the event is predominant enough to warrant capitalization! I spend several days preparing for this event with my children, making lessons out of each step. My middle and younger children help create a chart and calculate how much money has come in, and we make a budget for supplies. We must buy foil, graham crackers for construction, supplies for royal icing, and, of course, candy. SO MUCH CANDY! Willy Wonka and his factory have nothing on the spread we end up with! My kids and I look up some costs online, calculate, and keep information organized. When shopping, we compare cost per ounce, compare brands and styles of candy, and consider how to use coupons while tracking how much we are spending. The littles love getting to help shop and put the candy in the cart. It’s a game of maximizing quantity while staying within budget. As a bonus, we have developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the candy aisle of Walmart! Yes, I could do all of the planning for this event much faster by myself, but the time spent is time applying reading, penmanship, and decimal math skills. We have a tradition — a decade old now — of decorating sugar cookies with a family from church. It’s so funny how something so treasured started with a silly comment, “I like buttercream frosting. Let's make cookies.” There are currently twenty-three members between us, and that’s a lot of cookies! I work with my younger children to calculate how to make double and triple batches of dough and prepare it with them, while I’m trying to allow them to take the time to do the steps themselves. Here our lessons in reading and fractions find use. Everyone in the home typically takes a batch to roll and cut out their favorite shapes. It’s like a factory and is an exercise in efficiency every year. We also calculate frosting quantities and work together to color and bag them and prepare for the event. With so many people, it’s not unusual for us to have 12 colors to pipe, plus sprinkles! We enjoy a meal of Instapot soup together, talk, laugh and astound each other with unique and creative designs. And you know, it’s typically the teenage boys who come up with the most unique and hilarious ideas. I would be surprised if anyone in my home takes on baking as a profession, but it’s important to me that my children, both male and female, see preparing food as an ordinary and doable task of life. Presents: Our Beloved Book Flood When it comes to gift giving, a newer, but quickly favored tradition, is book flood. Homeschoolers love books, and this way we have an excuse mid-school year! When considering our family ancestry, I came across the Icelandic custom of ‘Jolabokaflod,’ which is gifting books on Christmas Eve, then snuggling up with hot cocoa and reading together until eyes droop and going to sleep comes easily. Last year was especially exciting with several of us (including mom!) practically drooling over a favorite series, which we had all waited to read the final installment of! I didn’t even let myself peek when wrapping. I think we finally played rock-paper-scissors to determine who got to read first! If it wasn’t clear already that we value reading and books at our home, I’m positive that this tradition will impress it on the young ones! Christmas Day: Scripture That Comes Alive Scripture takes a front row in our Christmas Day celebration, but we knew that realistically if we just listened to Dad read from a single gospel, the kids' heads would be distracted elsewhere. There’s a lot of sweets and shiny presents around after all! So, the reading is much more interactive in our home. We get out the Little People nativity set, a collection of stuffed animals, some lego figurines, a doll house, and whatever else seems useful and set up a general map of Israel, Egypt, and the far east of the magi. As we read, jumping around between gospels, we try to find all the different elements in as best chronological order as we can. The younger children act out each scene repeating or reciting the words of Scripture. The older kids typically help read and were part of setting up, although they have been known to jump into play acting! We have Gabriel appearing to Zachariah, Mary’s magnificent prayer of praise, some improvisation of Herod and the wise men, and Joseph taking his family to flee from Herod to Egypt. It’s hilarious, it’s precious, and never quite the same from year to year. My family loves our Christmas traditions. I’m always surprised at the delight and joy with which they cling to them and fondly recount them other times of the year. I hope some of these give you and your family ideas to celebrate together this December! Glory to God in the Highest! _________________________________ Betsy is a second-generation homeschooling mom of eight, ages 4 to 19, and considers herself blessed beyond measure. She loves twinkle lights, a crackling fire, eggnog in her coffee, and every year refuses to spend a lot of time picking a Christmas tree when it always looks great when full of ornaments anyway. She often joins her husband, Nathan, at events for Family Protection Ministries, where her heart is to encourage other moms and dads as we all walk the path of discipleship through homeschooling.
