Dave and Ashley Willis share how they keep Jesus central to Christmas through simple traditions: a birthday cake for Jesus, weekly Friday movie nights, a candlelight Christmas Eve service, and annual family pajama photos. They decorate with inflatables of their chiweenie Chichi and visit a Bethlehem village each year.
Questions this video answers
December 10, 2020.
Four boys.
A chiweenie (Chihuahua–dachshund mix), about ten pounds.
Every year.
Family movie night every Friday.
Chapters
Well, I am so excited that it is the Christmas season. It's probably my favorite time of the year, especially for our family, because I love putting up the lights, I love decorating for Christmas and I love how it makes our boys so excited.
Yeah, it really is. It's a magical time for them. And, and I love it. I love the way they, they get so excited when the decorations start going up outside. And, and there's so many little traditions that, that make the season special. Of course, you know, the main tradition is to, is to make sure that it's about Jesus. We don't want to get so lost in all of the, you know, all of the festivities that we forget what the main reason for the season is. And so we try to infuse that in what we do that, listen, we're celebrating the birth of Christ and all that he came to bring us. And there's so many reasons to celebrate because of that. And so how some of those traditions look in our family. Ashley's an amazing, amazing decorator, designer. So she gets the house looking like just a winter wonderland. And the Christmas tree every year is amazing. The outside of the house always has these beautiful wreaths and lights. And then the kids love tacky stuff.
Like we have to have something tacky.
Plenty of tacky stuff. So a lot of inflatable junk that they love.
We, I edited that. Like we moved recently and I edited our inflatables. And we. Every holiday, if it's a decorative holiday, we have to have our dog Chichi represented. She's a chiweenie. She's like a ten pound little chiweenie and she's precious.
And so tell them what a chiweenie is.
A chiweenie is mixture of a Chihuahua and a dachshund or wiener dog as some people call it. And she is just so precious. And so right now we have an inflatable chiweenie on our lawn.
With a Santa hat.
With a Santa hat. And it's so cute. And the kids just get such a kick out of it. So, yeah, we love that tradition of doing that. We also, we like to go to different events kind of around our town. And one way we kind of keep, you know, the real reason for the season being Jesus is we go to a Bethlehem village every year. And I just look forward to it so much every year. And basically, you know, you take your family and you walk through what they think maybe a Bethlehem village would have looked like during the year of Jesus birth. And you kind of, you know, you meet the different People and they're making different things. And then you come to the nativity scene and you see the animals and you see Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus and it's just the sweetest thing. And the kids every year, the sights and the smells and the feeling, I mean it just, it really kind of, it just envelops you and makes you remember what Christmas is all about. It's awesome.
Yeah, it is. And we also try to just have a lot of fun around that time of the year. So Family movie night is a weekly tradition at our house. Every Friday, every Friday night we find something to watch. And so through this season it's usually a lot of Christmas movies and a lot of the classic ones that we grew up with like Home Alone, which I've probably seen a hundred times and it's still funny and it gives my little boys way too many ideas about how to do like violent pranks on each other. But we still love it and watch it.
Elf.
Yeah, New classics like that new classic Elf. We were, we were at her parents house recently and me and my brother in law and her dad, we put on Elf in this theater room at her parents house thinking the kids would watch it. And then we realized later that just the three men were sitting there watching Elf by ourselves and just enjoying it.
With no kids were like playing. Kids were off doing stuff right outside. It was so funny.
It's just fun. It's just fun. And I think just tapping into the fun and making those special memories is so important because the stuff our kids really cling to, it's the simple things like are we going to make hot chocolate, you know, on Saturday night? Are we going to, you know, go drive and look at Christmas lights? You know, like we love. And it doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to be all about just, you know, blowing money and getting way into debt with, with all of the online shopping and stuff. It's just how can we create some special moments together and make that, make that a big part of what the season's all about. And then we wrap it up Christmas Eve at our church. There's always, always a really special Christmas Eve service.
It's a candlelight service.
Yeah.
Which is so you get to hold a candle, which is really fun and a little dangerous. I have to say. My five year old, I'm working with them on that. But it's, but it's so beautiful when they turn off the lights and it's just candles and we're all singing or listening to or singing oh, Holy Night. And it's just beautiful, and we love it. And we also, you know, one of our traditions, too, is we make a birthday cake for Jesus. And I make the same cake every year. The kids, they really give me a lot of credit when it comes to baking, But I use a box, and then I also use icing I can buy, but then I just put Happy Birthday, Jesus on it. And on Christmas Day, we put candles on there and we blow it out and we say Happy Birthday, Jesus, and just again, trying to drive home the real meaning of Christmas. But I would have to say one of my most favorite traditions that we do as a family actually happened by accident probably about seven years ago, and that was making and decorating a gingerbread house. And so I guess our kid. We only had probably two kids at the time. We have four boys. But we got this. We wanted to start this tradition. And so Dave went and bought this Walmart kit of a gingerbread house. And we take it in our van, and our two older boys, you know, who were probably 5 and 7 at the time, were fighting over the box. Who's going to hold the box? And so we get home about probably 10 minutes later, and we go to open the box, and Dave's like, these pieces, like, there's no house that we can build anymore. It's literally just all broken into pieces. But what happened next was kind of magical.
Yeah, I was gonna throw it away, but Ashley said, no, it's not ruined. It doesn't have to look like the picture on the box. That's fake. That's not real life. And so I think sometimes in life we have this image of what the picture on the box supposed to look like. And Christmas rolls around and we think, my life doesn't look like this picture on the box that I thought that it would. But that picture is usually fake. It's not even what God called us to. And so we took the broken pieces from that gingerbread house, and we just had fun making broken gingerbread cookies and putting icing over them and having messed up each other's faces, rubbing icing on each other. We had a big time, and it.
Had to be now.
It's a tradition turn into tradition.
We literally break it up, you guys. We break it up and we decorate it, and I love it.
So you take the broken pieces that you might be dealing with this Christmas and let God make some masterpieces out of them and just have fun. One last tradition is that Ashley makes our four boys. Two of them are practically men dress up in Christmas pajamas.
I just order the Christmas jammies. I can't wait. It has a. Can I tell them?
Yeah, sure.
It has a skeleton. Tyrannosaurus rex with a Santa hat on it because that's how we roll in the Willis family.
That says it all right there. So be watching for that picture to drop on social media.
Yeah, we take a picture on the steps.
We have to bribe them every day.
Just watching them grow.
But it's always fun. So, hey, I hope it's a wonderful Christmas season for you and your family. I hope you remember to keep Jesus, the reason for the season, in the center of it and also to just have fun. Have fun and remember those simple things tend to make the greatest memories. Guys, thanks so much for watching. Hope you'll leave a comment. Hope you'll subscribe to this channel. God bless. Hope to see you soon.
