[SomeBunniesMom]

My husband and I had been talking about Christmas traditions this week, so it's funny you would start a thread about that very subject.

I also very much like the ornament a year idea. I love Christmas ornaments anyway, and I think it would be great to have a collection of special ornaments that i have collected for the kids over the years to send off with them when they have homes of their own one day.

I have been feeling that Chirstmas has become way too commercialized and it depresses me somewhat. Before we got the children I wanted to de-emphasize the expensive gift exchange part and focus more on spiritual and simple gifts. Which is kind of odd for me since I'm not an overly religious person.

My children were born on Christmas eve but they were not with us at that time. Their first Christmas in America was their first birthday, which is a little confusing to some people. My kids got a ton of gifts from family and friends and we also bought them a lot of stuff, mostly for the pleasure of being able to buy gifts for our own kids. But then I thought well, this is so far away from the more simpler way I wanted to start celebrating with my family. We need to do something very different this year.

This is what my husband and I were thinking about doing. Since the kids get a lot of gifts from other people, we thought that instead of buying them so much ourselves, we would stick with a more sentimental gift, such as a special ornament, and instead give a donation in their name to the orphanage that they came from. We figure there isn't anything we really need -- now that we have our family we have everything we want. We would like to show appreciation and gratitude to the people who took care of our children until we could get them, and to the people who made it possible for these children to be with us. I think that would really satisfy my sense of "de-materialized" giving, and be something that has so much more meaning than a few toys that the kids would outgrow in a few months or so.

What do you all think? Is this realistic?