You Don’t Have to Decorate Like Your Mom

Holidays are full of friends, family, parties, celebrations and other such traditions! Many of those traditions and decorating are passed down from generation to generation.

While I am not aiming to start any family blood feuds, where is it written that you have to decorate or celebrate the way your parents did?

Growing up my family spent an entire weekend (and then some) playing Christmas music and decorating for the holidays. I remember carrying tote after tote from the basement full of decorations and other Christmas related items. That was our family tradition and it worked for us (most of the time).

While we were visiting with family over the holidays, I got into this debate with my brother on the “requirements” of Christmas decor. He is recently married and him and the wife decorated for the holidays, but they didn’t go all out as our parents did when growing up.

While one of the major focuses of the holiday is family and friends, it is important to remember to do things for yourself too. If decorating for the holiday is a chore you are doing it wrong.

Feel free to start your own traditions and decorate in a way that makes you happy. Since we are a Lego Family we decided to help our Brother/Uncle with his Christmas Decorations.

We are blessed to live in an amazing time for “non-traditional” Christmas/Holidays. If putting up a traditional nativity set is what makes you and the family happy go for it. But don’t be afraid to make the holidays your own.

There are lots of geeky options out there for those geeky family’s like ours. While some of our family and friends are huge Lego fans like us and include them in their decorations. Some of them embrace their video gamer nature when decorating.

We saw a lot of Nintendo ornaments this year on our friends trees this year. Which is something we never would have seen on our Mom’s tree.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all of our friends! Do not be afraid to start your own traditions and decorate in a way that fits your family/household!

AFOL, TFOL, KFOL … oh my

When we first started our journey with Leonidas’ Lair, we were overwhelmed with these acronyms, and I am ashamed to admit we didn’t know what they meant.

What is even more embarrassing about it all is the AFOL community was the first and loudest to come to our banner.  The first to start following us and several of them became some of our best and most supportive internet friends.

So to hopefully save someone else the embarrassment and headache. 

AFOL = Adult Fan of Lego

TFOL = Teen Fan of Lego

KFOL = Kid Fan of Lego

Like a lot of acronyms when you spell them out in context it seems painfully obvious but it took us awhile.

As a parent and an AFOL it was exciting to learn that there are online communities dedicated to older fans of Lego. Lego was not only bringing multiple generations together in our household but across the globe as well.

A few quick links to AFOL communities online worth checking out.

• Reddit AFOL
• Facebook AFOL
• Meetup AFOL

There are also a lot of awesome Instagram AFOL accounts worth mentioning but that is another post.

The creativity and level of detail in some of the AFOL builds are just incredible. It is also fun to see some pop culture references recreated in Lego Format.

So good news to Lego fans young and old! You are never too old at least until. . .

Once again thank you to the AFOL community for being so supportive of this project! Hope to do some dedicated posts to some of our favorite AFOL internet friends in the near future!