Christmas Tradition from Mountain View Elementary

     "While helping out at the school – One little tradition that I started when my kids first began at Mountain View was helping to plan out the Christmas party for either Amy or Kristy’s class – and I remember thinking at the time, “you know what would be so great? To just have a party at my house because that way you’ve got everything there instead of having to transport everything to the school. You could have access to a kitchen to do some baking everything would be right there you’d have like a bigger space.” 

      "I started toying around with this idea – I came up with a formula that we did for the next…..humm, gosh….until Kylie finished up 5^thgrade so for the next 13(?) years I’d have to go figure it out. So anyway we did it for a long time, it worked extremely well. I was known for it and it was called “Christmas around the World” and it became my reputation at the school and everybody knew if they had a Lambert kid in their class – we didn’t do it with the Kindergarten classes, but with 1 through 5 that they would get to do “Christmas around the World” at the Lambert home. Wonderful opportunities and situation to meet lots of other parents, lots of children to just teach and have fun and it was wonderful. Here’s what we would do: 

      "We would walk the children over to our home (there was only one year it rained and that was only a little bit) but the children would walk over to our home, they would arrive here and we would divide them into six groups. I had five other mom’s who were helping me, they would be in different rooms of the house. The children would rotate around and it was eight minutes at each station. Each station would be different countries and they would be in that room for eight minutes with that parent who would teach them about a different country from around the world. 
     "I’m talking about some of the words of that language, some of the things that are important to the people there, some of the holiday traditions and customs, and things the country is known for, some of the food items from that country. Right at the end of their presentation each of the children had a “suitcase” – which was a brown paper bag with their name on it – and they were given a souvenir of that country, just a small little item that the parents had made that would remind the child of the country that they had ‘visited’. 
     "Then a parent was in charge of the timing so we would ring the hand bells and then the children would rotate into the next ‘country’. They did that for the first hour and then we would come together and we would ring the hand bells and sing a couple of Christmas songs. That was always wonderful;  one of my favorite was “Silent Night” because I knew the chords so well that I could divide the children into groups according to what bell they were playing into what chord they needed to be and they could sing it. Sometimes the children didn’t know all the words but the adults there would also help sing and then I could just indicate with my hand and direct what chords they needed to play – it was a very sweet experience as they would play the hand bells. It was very fun. 
     "The kids were very good about playing them properly and that worked really, really well. The first several years the kids were coming in Amy and Kristy's classes, there were only 20 in each class that was fabulous – 20 kids was awesome. In the space we had to work with in the big kitchen and the big living room and it worked out really well. So then after ringing the hand bells, we would then divide them up into four groups and they would rotate to different stations for the next hour. 
     "In this rotation they would play Holiday Bingo or Christmas Bingo and when the Handbell rang they would go to make Reindeer Cookies and Decorate cookies in the kitchen, in the dining room area they were stringing popcorn and cranberries and in the Family room they were making a little ornament. 
     "Over the years we did different things – One that worked out the best and it worked really, really well is a little teddy bear wreath that was surrounded with these little beads that we had put on with a pipe cleaner, it was something they could do with the ten minutes that they had, simple but really cute. So they would put all their stuff in their ‘suitcase’ and we would bring them together and sit them on the floor of the dinning room area and we would pass out to them some different holiday treats from different countries. 
     "Again this is where the parents came in helped with some different things and I had different – I would make (Lussekatter?) which came from Sweden which are rolls which have to do with Sankta Lucia day, they have poppy seed cookies which were from Lithuania I think, other parents would bring other different holiday traditional cookies. We would also make wassail or spiced punch that came from England when they would go “Wassailing” Christmas caroling in the streets. 
     "Then when they were done, they would get their coats back and get their ‘suitcase’ in their hand and head off back to the school. Later on that day before the end of school I would bring over to them, their cookies which they had iced and decorated, and also their reindeer cookies which were by that time cool enough and they could bring them home. 
     "Like I said it was a wonderful tradition it worked out really, really well the kids looked forward to having my kids in their class – for other reasons too – they were happy to have the field trip to the Lambert house for Christmas, for the Christmas party.  
     "The things that I liked about it was the fact that it involved a lot of parents, I loved the fact that it was educational but also really, really fun, and something very different nobody else was doing this to have this field trip to their house.  It worked out really well.  When I had multiple children of multiple ages, we would either - most of the time we would do it on different days. I think in that first year we had Kristy’s class come one day and Amy’s class another day just depending on what the schedule was. 
     "There was one time that we had to do it where we had one in the morning and one in the afternoon – that worked! It was a little crazy in between and by the end of that day I was exhausted. But it worked out really, really well. I was very happy to do it, it was kind of my gift to the children and to the teacher. That worked out really well. There was only one time over the years that we didn’t have the parent help me and that was when Kristy was in second grade in Mrs. Hartman’s class; didn’t quite have enough parental help and there was a – one student who – the family did not celebrate Christmas so they weren’t going to be able to go on the field trip. Mrs. Hartman was really conflicted, “Do we go? Do we not?” I said, “Look, lets just do something over at the school and I will just bring over all my stuff and we’ll kind of do this – we’ll have a separate party that the parents can help plan and help do but I will just come over and be about an hour and do the rotational part of different countries around the world and how they did their customs. Because that was the educational part of it. That was done really well and the parents were fine with that. 
      "To this day Mrs. Hartman regrets that she didn’t just bring the class over and let that child stay in another classroom because she felt that some of the kids really missed out on that opportunity and she missed out on it because she retired soon after that and she could have done it.
     "Worked out really well and we did it all through Eric’s five years at Mountain View, we don’t do it in Kindergarten just one through five and then we did it with Kylie grades one through four and then fifth grade since it was going to be my very last time of doing it, I got the idea that we wanted to do it for both of the classes. Of course we couldn’t do it here at Mountain View and so we moved it over – we did it at the school – we were able to locate six different classrooms that we could rotate around for the kids to do it – and we kind of expanded it a little bit too – some of the things we did – something I’d never done before was we brought in some dancers. Moira O’Bryant in our ward is a flamingo dancer, Michelle Conover does clogging and Ellen Panek does dancing from the islands – Maori dancing.
        "Michelle and Moira and Ellen were very happy to come over and they dressed up in full costume. Moira did the make-up and the beautiful dress and they were able to teach that station and it worked out really, really well. Florence Conover was very gracious to come over and run that station for me because I had to do the hand bells and couldn’t get in to take that one over so I did the hand bell one. 
     "It worked out really well, it was challenging having the bigger groups of kids but it worked out well, we had good parental help. So that was the last time I did that. I really enjoyed it over the years by the time we got done I was glad to see it go but I was glad that we could do it for all those years. I enjoyed having it in my home especially when the kids were – when there were 20 kids in the classroom that was delightful and three kids in the group when we were rotating around 3 or 4 that was really, really fun."