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Every family has their traditions at holiday time. When I was growing up, my brother laid out a stick manger scene and would move the “three wise men” sticks every day of the twelve days until Epiphany.
Children bring joy to our traditions. Our youngest daughter is now 27 years old, but we still display “Hans the frog” in the front yard. When Martha was three years old, she announced with complete confidence that the frog residing in the back flower bed was Hans. Thus our family totem became a frog. A few years later, my husband who is quite handy with wood created an over-sized frog in a Santa hat. He took the design from a child’s coloring book. I can remember him painstakingly transferring the design to graph paper.
Hans has decorated our yard for Christmas every year for close to 25 years. It’s just not Christmas without him.
Our children are grown up adults now, so Jeff asked me if he should put up the frog. “Maybe I can just bolt it to the wall on the front porch?”
“No way!” I exclaimed. “The magnificence of the frog is the shadow it casts on the castle.”
So here he is, in all his silly magnificence…the giant shadow of Hans the Santa-frog!
I’m sure your family has a silly holiday tradition. Please share in the comments.
Love that shadow! What fun for your daughter when she was little! We are rather boring and don’t have any fun traditions like the frog. Merry Christmas!
Happy Holidays, Lee Ann.
I love this! I’m still waiting for our silly family tradition. So far all of my ideas have flopped. I need my husband to come up with an idea he will support! 😉
So original and fun. We put coins in the stockings to match the kids’ ages- like 10 pennies, 10 nickels, 10 dimes, and 10 quarters. Sometimes there was a mad scramble to search under couch cushions, etc. when we almost came up short. ( We did the same thing in Easter baskets, putting the coins in plastic eggs.)