After my husband and I got married, we decided that it was traditions were important to our family. Not just traditions we each brought from our own childhoods, but establishing traditions for our new and growing family as well. One of our new traditions is the Christmas Advent Binder.
We have a page protector pocket in our binder for each day in December, up until Christmas Day. Each page has a short little story and an activity to do as a family. There is also a CD with 24 Christmas songs (one for each day) but some evenings it gets listened to in it’s entirety.
We complete one page protector a day, usually in the evenings. Sometimes on the weekends we’ll do it earlier in the day or in pieces (read the story at breakfast and do the activity a little later in the day when the kiddo is getting restless and bored).
Not all days are spiritual and religious-based. Some days are a more relaxed and fun. The stories have topics from serving others and having gratitude for what we have to helping out at home and, of course, the story of the birth of the Christ-child. 
I got most of the stories from The Friend magazine (published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) and the activities were ones I’d gathered from a lot of sources and ideas. I went through all our Christmas music and chose songs that correlated (as closely as I could find anyway) to the stories. I tried to do the same with the activities, but some of them are completely random and have nothing to do with the stories. It’s all good memory building, though.
It’s a fun tradition and a small way to help our family remember that, although the presents and parties are fun, Christmas is about more than what we get under the tree.
Happy Holidays! And thanks again, Amy!
Krista
