Daily Read #24: Do you countdown?

So at what age did you stop counting down to Christmas? Maybe you haven't stopped. But at some point I did. Sure I still count down other things---days until that paper is due, hours until bedtime but days until Christmas...nope.

Unfortunate because we've had some really good ways to count down too.

Paper chains in early elementary school. Alternating red loops and green loops strung until they made it up to the golden bell. Grad School should do that too except instead of golden bell they could have a skull and cross bones.


[pict actually came from this blog; the author has on each loop a Christmasish activity that they then do as a family; kind of fun if you can tolerate that much holiday cheer :]

One year we had a long chain made of saran saran wrap; every few inches there was a pouch of cinnamon bears or maybe Hershey's kisses. We'd unwrap one pouch an evening until the big night.

Then there is the classic Christmas chocolate window advent. We each were given one one year. I'm surprised I ever had that kind of will power. Maybe I didn't and that's why they were a one time treat.

The wonderous fabric of felt gave our family two unique advents. One that looked a little bit like this with an ornament you would pin on for every day leading up to Christmas.


The other was for when we were on our missions. The internet failed to give me a picture and I'll do a bad job of describing it maybe I'll get a picture later. It had a dowel that went up from a stand and there were twenty four pockets made out of green felt that made up the Christmas tree for twenty four little individually wrapped presents. It was the envy of all other missionaries well except when I had it in my luggage in the MTC...in June. One particularly memorable gift was these little single serve squeeze packets of skippy peanut butter. To a missionary in Korea it was like a prisoner getting a little packet of freedom.

Well lame post I know, but I think this is close to the 20,000th word I've written today. You got the last couple I could massage out of my finger tips [I'm afraid the cream got splattered elsewhere].

The reason for the countdown theme is that I've obviously added one because tomorrow is the first day your view matters (well to someone besides me) No it's not a countdown till Christmas but one to get to the end of the Pledge date for Santa's Bag of Books. So far we have $1.35 per view in pledges but of course we could always use more--click the picture of the 'Change' and see what you can do (if you can't do more than a penny, it will be appreciated nonetheless). You can see what the traffic for this week looked like at the bottom of the blog to see what your pledge would translate too [Monday kind of inflated the numbers a bit].

And if nothing else come back daily and don't forget to bring a friend. Probably one of the best ways to get them here is to add our button to your blog's sidebar. They'll click through out of curiosity and my wit and charm will keep them coming back for more :)