It’s Christmastime!

Advent is huge in this Catholic nation. I mean huge. Both in the spiritual sense as well as the consumerism sense. Since I grew up Anglican, we always celebrated advent with the little cardboard advent calendar that helped to keep track of the days until Christmas with it’s magical windows that you opened each day. It was always such a great joy to me as a kid. And we built our advent wreaths and lit the candles for dinner each night.

My goal this special Christmas year, is to partake in some of the Austrian traditions along with some of our own. Thankfully, some of those traditions line up with our own. In Austria, all of the stores carry advent calendars. Every shape, size, brand you can possibly imagine. Some are 3-D towers filled with candy compartments and quite extravagant. Some are $50 or more filled with famous Lindt Chocolates obviously geared toward adults. The boys settled on lego calendars that build part of a winter scene each day. All of the florists as well as the grocery stores sell premade advent wreaths and candles.

There are fresh cut Christmas trees everywhere that you can buy. In fact, I saw a number of people carrying theirs through the mall the other day! All of the Christmas markets have giant trees. And since the Christmas tree is the centerpiece of Christmas at home, I wasn’t sure how to handle that one logistically. We didn’t remember to pack a great number of things, much less a tree stand and ornaments!

Our landlord was gracious enough to let us borrow one of the potted trees from the patio and decorate it. So we trudged across the patio and picked out the perfect little fir tree from the “forest” of potted greenery. Not sure what was harder, actually cutting a tree down or lugging in a potted tree. Thankfully we didn’t have that far to go!

I purchased a string of lights and a bunch of candy ornaments and gift tags to decorate with. We can “eat” the decorations on Christmas, return the tree to the forest after the holiday and not have to take anything home with us.

We plan to have family in town for the celebration, and filled stockings on Christmas morning is one of my favorite things. I hung some fuzzy house socks as stockings that we can use afterward when we lounge in jammies post Christmas feast and then using ChromeCast, “built a real fire” on the TV and set it to Christmas music.  We have sufficiently decked the halls.

#music #everydaylife #culture #home #Christmas #family