It is that time of year again! The holidays are approaching fast! Every store I go into has Thanksgiving and Christmas items plastered everywhere (and have since before Halloween, but don’t get me started on that!) and signs reminding me that I only have about 37 shopping days left. Christmas music playing, signs advertising the arrival of Santa Claus, and the more I see the more stressed out I get!
There is so much to do and so little time! “The holidays are coming” rings in my head like Chicken Little’s “The sky is falling” or Paul Revere yelling “The British are coming!” It is enough to make the most organized person want to crawl under the covers and hide until Boxing Day!
One of the many benefits of homeschooling is that I can take the kids to all sorts of awesome events during the week. We don’t have to wait till the evening or the weekend, so it tends to be less crowded. Not always, but more times than not.
One of the struggles I have is choosing what events we want to go to. There are so many of them in and around Oklahoma City! I researched and found great events in the metro, including Lyric's A Christmas Carol at the Civic Center Music Hall, Chesapeake Energy Snow Tubing at the Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark, Scuba Santa at the Oklahoma Aquarium, fun events at the Myriad Gardens and an entire list of events taking place as part of Downtown in December. For information on these and more, check out MetroFamily's Holiday Fun Guide!
It can be very overwhelming to figure out what events to go to and how to make it all fit into not only your schedule, but your budget too. This time of year our budget is pretty tight with the added expense of holiday dinners, co-op parties, gift shopping & shipping, and so on. The best “trick” I have found is to make a list of the things I am interesting in doing with my family. Then I research days, times and the cost. I immediately eliminate anything that just doesn’t fit our budget or schedule. No point in getting the kids all excited about something we can’t go to. Then I present the list to my husband and let him mark of anything he can’t got to with us or is ok if we go without him. Then we sit down with the kids and decide which events they are interested in. We usually limit it to one per week depending on our schedule and budget.
This will be our 4th Christmas in OKC, and every year we learn about new events that we don’t want to miss. So if there is something we just can’t make work this year, we make sure to make a note to look for it the next year! That way if we need to save up in order to do it, we have plenty of time to do so!
What are your favorite holiday events in and around OKC Metro?
