Traditions, some people hate ’em but I love ’em! I think there is just something so nice about doing the same thing every year or every time a special occasion/day comes up on the calendar or in your family’s life. I thought I would share a few of ours that we do around Christmas time every year, maybe to inspire you if your family doesn’t quite do them or just so you can get an idea of what we do to make our house a little merrier this time of year.
First, I always buy everyone new Christmas pajamas. I try to buy the kidlets matching pairs that they can wear on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day. You know, for super cute ripping-the-presents-open pictures.
We always make platters, and I’m talking about the weigh 12 lbs type of platters, of Christmas cookies for our family and friends.
We like to visit Santa, as you know from this post, and take pictures of this adventure for each of their memory boxes.
We make a photo calendar with pictures of the kidlets from the year past and give this to both of our families. We started this last year and hope to continue it until the littles go off to college. How fun, right? We buy additional calendars for each kidlet to put in their memory boxes as well.
On Christmas Eve, we read the story about the birth of Jesus and explain how on Christmas morning Baby Jesus will be in his manger in our Nativity scene. I have heard of some families wrapping the Baby Jesus up and putting him under the tree so that one of the kids opens him as the last gift to bring all the present opening mayhem to an end and the real reason for Christmas is then the main focus. I think we may start doing this…I think it’s such a great idea, it’s so easy for little ones to get caught up in the presents!
We also always decorate a gingerbread house! I just love this activity, it let’s your kidlets go wild in the mess department…if you’re willing to go there!! This year, just for Noah, we decorated a Choo-Choo. Why, here are some pictures from this year…amazing, how I just happened to have a few to share with you! 🙂
Getting ready to decorate…er, uh to eat candy!?!
Decorating the choo-choo…but we all know it’s really about how much candy he can get in his belly first.
The finished product, with one green tongue to use as evidence
There’s a Choo-Choo in there somewhere!!
Noah trying to crack a few nuts...another tradition we like to do in our home
And some random pictures of Penny since she was sleeping during the Choo-Choo decorating. Here is our Wild Thing in all her Wild Woman glory!
Whoa, she is one hyper little lady sometimes!
What traditions do you have in your family?
It’s never to late to start!
