Feast of St. Nicholas - December 6th

We "celebrated" the Feast of St. Nicholas. I saw this post on Catholic Mothers Online and loved it! I loved that (when the boys are a bit bigger to understand more) we can learn about St. Nicholas and the story of Santa Claus and - get ready for this moms - we can lessen the chaos of Christmas morning! HA! See, on the Feast of St. Nicholas, we see what has been left in our stockings. Ah, ha!

A little info from Catholic Mothers Online:

Christmas Stockings

The beginnings of Christmas stockings came from one of the stories about St. Nicholas.  As the story goes, he heard of 3 maidens whose father could not afford a dowry.  In order to keep them from being sold into slavery, he threw money for their dowry into the window which landed in their stockings.

You can read more about the stories behind the other fun Christmas traditions here, such as candy canes, chocolate gold coins, and oranges. 

What we did:

We hung up our stockings when we set out all of our other decorations. After dinner on the 6th, while I still had every sitting at the table finishing up (those 2 little guys are ALWAYS on the move!), I read a little story about St. Nicholas. Of course, I chopped up the story. I do have a 2 year old and an 8 month old - what else can you do? I told them about a family who didn't have enough money to have a party for their children. So, when it was night time and everyone was asleep, a nice man from church Nicholas threw some gold coins in their windows. (almost the same - next year I'll change it up again to make it more like the story above in red ) Andrew thought that was pretty cool. He said, "Money!" LOL

Once the story, was over I grabbed the stockings (which were filled during nap time - by the way, since they were already up...it wasn't something NEW and EXCITING to mess with. So, Andrew never even noticed) and brought them to the table. Andrew and Alex were both smiling! It was so cute! Jason was smiling, too - I guess he didn't realize we were opening our stockings! Surprises for everyone! 

Every one got chocolate gold coins and a few small presents. 

Jason's stocking - Gold coins and A&W Root Beer Jelly Beans

Andrew's stocking - Gold coins, Christmas book "5 Little Christmas Trees", a mini Santa snow globe, and his ornament for this year (picture below)

Alex's stocking - Gold coins (no, he didn't eat them. but he liked shaking them in the little bag they came in - picture at beginning), Christmas book "Hello Santa", and his ornament for this year (picture below)

My stocking - That's right, Mama needs a prize, too! Oh, what's that? Dark Hot Chocolate K-Cups?! St. Nicholas is awesome. ;) Kidding...I didn't put those in my stocking. Alex has my gold coins actually. But I did get the k-cups! 

For more stocking-stuffer ideas for the little ones, you can read my post from last year. Do you have any special stocking traditions?