Christmas Field Trips

 Do you want to combine hands-on-learning with celebrating Christmas?  Then plan some special Christmas field trips for the month of December!  Almost every store, museum, bank, business, and church decorates for Christmas.  Just going on your weekly errands, you can discuss Christmas decorations.  You can observe whether these places are saying, "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays."  You could even collect data and make a bar graph!  But seriously, every place is more fun to visit at this festive time of year because it's all decked out! 

Even Christmas shopping can be educational if you start with a budget.  Your children can make a list and check it twice, comparing sales, and sticking to the money allotted.  They can do the same with holiday grocery shopping!

    We love to visit all the craft fairs that take place this time of year, especially at the church bazaars where the little old ladies bake pies, cakes, and cookies.  Nothing is better than those homemade goodies!  Not only is it fun to look at all the art and crafts, but we often get ideas for making our own Christmas gifts.  There are always special holiday events that can be found in the newspaper or online.  Several cities nearby have "Tour of Homes" where you get to visit lovely homes decorated for Christmas.  Often they serve hot drinks.  Going at night is usually the best because of all the candlelight and twinkle lights.  There is so much history to learn on these tours, as well as information on architecture and remodeling.  We're attending Sanford's Tour of Homes this weekend.

Holiday concerts, plays, and productions are annual events in your city that you and your children may have not yet enjoyed.  Our local community college, Seminole Community College, offers free holiday concerts that are wonderful!  There is always a band concert and a chorus concert.  We dress up and enjoy the music!  They also have a free Messiah sing-a-long that we have enjoyed participating in.  There are solists picked before hand, but when you arrive, you get your free copy of the music and head to your section:  soprano, alto, tenor, or bass.  You can also just listen.  We have attended many free church performances in our area.  The talent in the Body of Christ never ceases to amaze me.  We have enjoyed concerts and plays that were excellent for free or a nominal fee.  

Our favorite production happens every year in the next town over:  Longwood.  It is called "Walk Through Bethlehem" and it is just that.  There is a reenactment of the entire city of Bethlehem complete with shepherds, Mary, Joseph, and all kinds of townspeople.  The Gospel is presented clearly, so we always try to bring someone who needs to hear the Good News that causes us to celebrate Jesus' Birthday! 

An hour south of us, near Disney, is the town of Celebration, which hosts nightly "snow flurries" that look a tiny bit like soap suds.  It is an enchanting town and we have traveled down several years to play in the "snow" and enjoy ice cream in one of Celebration's quaint shops.  Closer to home, last year an assisted living facility hosted "snow" (cold and from a snow machine) for the children in the area.  Our children had so much fun.  Afterward, we went inside and enjoyed a spectacular model home and train display.  The decorations inside were gorgeous too! 

4H often has Christmas baking workshops and ornament making workshops early in December.  When the children were little I would pay the tiny fee, drop them off, and head home to wrap presents.  My youngest children still enjoy going! 

Field trips can help to bring special meaning to our Christmas celebrations.  Each Christmas Eve, we join another family on a Traveling Dinner to remind our children that Mary and Joseph were traveling on Christmas Eve.  If you want to read more about this family tradition/field trip, see my article in the holidays column right here at Take Root and Write.  Our First Traveling Dinner!

Yes, I do live in Central Florida.  Yes, I can go to Disney, Sea World, Universal, or The Holy Land--which all decorate and celebrate the season WELL!  But frankly, I usually don't  have money around Christmas to take a family of seven (and whoever else happens to be living with us at the time!) to a theme park!  So, we have discovered all sorts of fun and inexpesive family fun trips (called field trips for record keeping purposes!).  In our newspaper, Thursday is the day that all the events in the area are listed.  I have discovered all kinds of neat field trips ideas right there in our newspaper!  There is something marvelous about setting school aside and going on an adventure with your children--especially if your husband gets to come too!  We make room for fun in December with unit studies and field trips! 

Of course, our very favorite Christmas field trip is to pile into the minivan and travel around the city looking at Christmas lights.  And our very favorite house is on Upsala Road, 1/2 mile away.  Well, actually, it's three houses that belong to a nursery...you can find us camping out in their front yard after dark!

Merry Christmas Field Tripping!