A fellow homeschool Mom and user of Tapestry of Grace curriculum, Molly at http://www.counterculturalmom.blogspot.com/ is hosting a blog carnival this month.

She also offers excellent podcasts about "Preparing your heart for Christmas". I enjoyed it tremendously and it challenged me to take a deeper look at my Advent activities, which led me to start the Inductive Bible study.

Her emphasis for this week's blog is Christmas books and music. I already posted about our Advent studies and our miscellanous activities so now I will share our other favorites.

Since D loves the trumpet, Kenny G's Miracles Christmas album gets top billing here. I have all of my Christmas albums saved onto the computer and the one album that gets played by me is All-Time Christmas Favorites, vol. 4. My all time favorite song is Silent Night.

We just finished listening to "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens last week as our Literature selection. Then I got the video from the library, unfortuately there are many versions of this classic and it was the newest animated version from the viewpoint of a pair of mice. So off to the library I went again and got the correct one. It is on the calendar to watch it this weekend.

We are almost done listening to Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and it is teaches about Christmas' and blizzards of days long past. The last time we studied this time period we did a Laura Ingalls Christmas party with our TOG coop.

One of my favorite Christmas books is actually a series by Karen Kingsbury called the Red Gloves series: Hannah's Hope; Sarah's song; Gideon's Gift; Maggie's Miracle.

Since I have little ones in the house for so many years-- some of our favorite books are kids books.

Who is coming to our House? by Joseph Slate

The Crippled Lamb by Max Lucado

Mary's First Christmas by Walter Wangerin Jr.

Praying you are all finding ways to celebrate the CHRIST season-