Project learning: Christmas (all year around maybe)

One of the best parts of homeschooling is that even studying Christmas traditions can be viewed as useful and quite frankly necessary. It's the kids' future we are talking about and I will myself make an effort of spending some time on the class "Christmas" just so they can be better prepared for the future. And to be sure it will stay with them this is one of the themes that will be worked on for several months every year. 

I am grateful for being so creative because I can find numerous ways of proving that we are covering all the subjects like math, history, science, litterature etc by diving deep in to this field. 

Actually, we are a bit late this year when I now begin to digest just how much I want us to learn before the day is here. And the Day with capital D has been the subject. 

It is quite frustrating when we watch movies and Santa Claus is coming to town on the night of Christmas Eve. AFTER we have opened the gifts in Norway on Christmas Eve. How do we explain this? He even visits many homes on Christmas Eve with a bag of gifts, so who put the gifts under the tree before he came? Who filled the stockings that we get on the morning of Christmas Eve? Why does he bother to visit so many times if he is so busy? Parents before have made the deal of keeping the Christmas spirit alive quite hard for us who come after and have to explain all this to the kids. 

When we visited the Cathedral of Malaga the kids got quite engaged in Jesus and the birth of Jesus and of course the cross and why not just hang his hands with rope because then he could hang without being in so much pain and so on and so on.... Anyways, at the same time we talked about traditions and here in Spain they have this other tradition which focuses on the three wise men. This takes place in the beginning in January and this year we got to experience that. Real fun for the kids with a big parade and Mickey Mouse together with the three wise men throwing candy. 

I cant wait for this to become active.