December Recap...

For those of you who don't know, Jon was born and raised in Holland. Amongst many fun and interesting traditions and holidays the Dutch celebrate is the holiday of Sinterklaas. Each year around the end of November, Sinterklaas (kind of like Santa) and his elves travel on a steamboat from Spain to Holland. Sinterklaas observes the children for a week and then determines if they deserve gifts. Every year on December 5 (the actual day of Sinterklaas' visit) we get together with Jon's side of the family to celebrate. This year we also celebrated Bobby's return home from serving a 2-year mission for our church earlier this year. It was the perfect time to update the family pictures!

At the end of November, we picked eachother's names for a gift exchange. As part of the exchange, we get to wrap the gift to represent the person in whom we are buying for. We also write a poem about the person and sign the letter from Sinterklaas. It is such a fun tradition (and if I wasn't out of town right now I would post some pictures of some of the fun wrap jobs this year. Maybe when I get home!). Another fun tradition is that the kids all put their shoes on the front porch. During the festivities, Sinterklaas comes and fills the kid's shoes with candy and knocks on the door. The kids run to the door to see what he left them. The kids LOVED it! I am excited that we have some of these fun traditions to carry on in our family to represent Jon's rich heritage.