Wise men Hide and Seek - Day 1

Wise men hiding in the blanket box under our daughter's bed.

So practically everyone I know seems to have an Elf on the Shelf so I guess I started wondering if we were missing out on something.  Elf on the Shelf specifically is not my cup of tea because Santa doesn't visit our house.  Our daughter will tell you that Santa is imaginary if you ask her.

For our family, we have chosen to make the birth of Christ the focus of our Christmas celebration.  We do, however, still exchange gifts and we still have stockings hung on our fireplace.  They're just not from Santa. Our daughter helps us choose gifts to put in our stockings and we give her the gifts in hers.

So, this year I came across an idea on Pinterest called Wise men's Adventures.  A Catholic mom wrote up a blog of a set of Playmobile wise men getting into trouble around her house daily.  Her idea was similar to Elf on the Shelf, in that, the wise men came to life every night and her children woke up to find them getting into trouble.  She took pictures of the trouble they got into.  Each night they got closer to the manger scene as they were on their way to see Jesus while they got into this trouble.

I thought it was a cool idea.  However, the more I thought about it the more I started worrying that we were literally just replacing one for the other.  The only thing that was different was that nobody reported back to Santa, which was often part of Elf on the Shelf's job.  However, these wise men still came to life on their own and I still felt like I would be lying to my daughter if we did it that way unless she knew that it was just pretend.

So. . .here's what I came up with. . .

Wise men hide and seek.

Our daughter is nearly 4 and LOVES Hide and Seek so we decided that instead of only us making the Wise men get into trouble/ hide, we would include our daughter in this.  So today my daughter and I "hid" the wise men together and her dad will have to find them when he gets home from work.  Tomorrow he will hide them for us to find.

She was IMMENSELY excited by this.  It's allowing her to be creative and imaginative.  She came up with where to hide them today!  I'm hoping this game will continue to be a lot of fun as we continue to play it throughout December.