The Taulman Old Fashioned Christmas Overview

Here is our Christmas tree ...

Actually it is, so far. Eli has an undying love for all things Charlie Brown, and A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of his favorites (mine too). I get teary when I watch it. Last year for Eli's birthday (which is this month) we got him the Charlie Brown Christmas tree for one of his gifts. Since we aren't getting our tree until December 17th, we put this one out today to represent our tree until then.

I wrote about our plans for an Old Fashioned Christmas here. I have a desperate need for a simple and meaningful Christmas this year. It was all inspired by the book An Early American Christmas by Tomie dePaulo. In my opinion, Christmas has gotten out-of-hand to the point of misery. This year we will scale things down tremendously and do things an old-fashioned way. Here is an overview of our plans. There will be many more specifics coming soon:

The first thing I will be doing is ordering bayberry tapered candles and votives. We will burn these candles on our entertainment center above the stockings, on our kitchen table, and will put several in luminaries we will make and place on our front porch. The candles will take the place of any electric Christmas lights.

Brynne, Dawson and I will make lacey candles from scratch (instead of attempting to make our own bayberry tapers.) In Colonial days, they made their own candles. So, we will make some too.

I will make a simple evergreen wreath for our front door and an evergreen swag to place on top of our entertainment center above our stockings.

All of our tree decorations will be handmade and as organic as possible. We will make paper ornaments, will paint nuts a pretty gold, make crystal ornaments, make pomanders of oranges and cloves, dry orange slices and make sugar cookies to decorate and hang on the tree with ribbon. Our garland will be dried apple rings and popcorn. I'm putting Dawson in charge of a tree topper.

We will make waxed stars to put in our bushes on Christmas Eve.

Our Christmas tree will be purchased on Friday, December 17th, before the kids and I leave to spend a few days in Missouri with my family. We plan to purchase a Ball and Burlap Tree from our local Christmas Tree Farm so that we can plant it the day after Christmas. It will remain undecorated until December 23rd, when we return from our time with family.

We will decorate our tree as a family on the evening of December 23rd.

On Christmas Eve Dawson and I will spend the day baking pies ... a pumpkin, apple and coconut cream. We will invite Rick's sister and her family over for our traditional Christmas Eve Mexican dinner. We plan to have lots of sugar cookies on hand to decorate as a family while we sip eggnog. We will end the evening by getting out my favorite nativity set and having Uncle Milton and Rick read the Nativity story while the kids put out the pieces to the manger scene.

On Christmas Day we will celebrate by opening our gifts from Santa and exchanging our gifts between our family. Then we will lounge in our pjs most of the day playing with our new toys, fixing meals and eating.

The day after Christmas we'll plant our new tree and put away our decorations. And the cleanup will only take us a few minutes, because it will have all been done so simply.

Starting December 12th I will start a series of posts with links for all of the things we will be doing ~ a "12 Days of Simple Christmas" sort of idea:

1. Bayberry candles
2. Lacey candles
3. Luminaries
4. Evergreen wreath and swag
5. Waxed stars
6. The Christmas Tree
7. Paper decorations
8. Garlands
9. Sugar Cookie ornaments
10. Pomanders
11. Crystal ornaments
12. The tree topper

(These topics are subject to slight change, and will likely not be presented in this order.)

If you would like to join us in a simple version of Christmas, please do! I hope our ideas will inspire you!