Chains

Because we are in Ohio every Christmas, and we want to have our own family Christmas celebration, we started a tradition last year of having our family Christmas on the Saturday before the official Christmas.  Alice doesn't pay too much attention to the calendar and doesn't have the concept of Santa delivering toys to all the boys and girls on the same night, so we didn't have to explain the date shift at all.

In fact, once we had the tree up, and started reading Christmas books from the library, she assumed it would snow and Santa would come the next day.  To help her wait the couple of weeks until Christmas, we made chains like I had when I was a kid, where you break one link off each night so you can see it getting closer and closer to Christmas. Because she wanted to make two chains, we made one for Santa and one for Ohio.

You'll notice she's acting a bit shy.  She has a good sense for when anything is a ritual or performance, and she gets all weird.