I blogged about holiday traditions last year, too, but I reread that post and I promise this one won’t be exactly the same.
It’s early, but we’re already listening to Christmas music and Xander has been asking since before Halloween if it’s Christmas yet, so, I’m just going for it. Today we made a paper chain to count down the 41 days until The Big Day.
At 3.5, it seem like a good year to start really reinforcing, or even starting, the holiday traditions we want to have. I’m not entirely sure what they are, yet. And this year will be somewhat different since we’ll be traveling for Christmas, but we can still do some things that will become fun traditions.
In past years we have:
- Cut down our Christmas tree from a local farm
- Decorated the tree
- Decorated cookies
- Visited Santa
- Watched a holiday movie (Rudolf) on Christmas Eve with a special snack
- Eat Puffed Apple Pancake for breakfast on Christmas morning
I would like to keep those traditions. They are fun and festive but pretty low key. I want to add more, and I also want to solidify a few others. Like, we’ve had different things for dinner on Christmas Eve: hors devours, burgers, …. I don’t remember what else. I’d like to pick a Christmas Eve Dinner and have that be part of the tradition.
Other things I am thinking of adding as part of our family traditions:
- A non Evangelical church service on Christmas Eve night
- Selecting a name off of a Project Angel Tree tree and shopping with Xander for our child (I’ve done this in the past, but not included him as I thought it would be too hard for a 2 year old to buy a gift for someone else, but I do want that to be something he grows up with – the idea that we help people)
- Gingerbread houses (I’m not totally sold on this as it seems like a lot of sugar and candy and more sugar)
- Tree Lighting Ceremony. Our small town does it, and Burlington does it downtown. We’ve never gone because it’s been “late” for Xander, but it sounds fun.
- Writing letters to Santa
- Putting cookies out for Santa
- Cleaning out X number of toys to donate (goes along with the Angel Tree idea; also cuts down on the clutter)
What else? What do you do in the Holiday Season?
Even though Kalena is 5 we still don’t have very many specific traditions yet. I want to start doing some that include our heritage (setting out wooden shoes, celebrating St. Lucia’s day, etc.) We DO have a traditional Christmas Eve dinner: soup in bread bowls! Usually we make 2 kinds, but we won’t have that many people this year, so we’ll see.
Soup in a bread bowl! I LOVE THAT!
It’s great because we can switch up the soup (and we usually do!) without straying from tradition!
The secret to gingerbread houses is to do little tiny ones out of graham crackers and a can or icing. That way there is not so much candy. We’ve done the kits before & those things last for-e-ver which is not so good with little ones. Great list!
In addition to cookies for santa mom always had Mary and I put out carrots for the reindeer. We also did Christmas carols basically nonstop for a few weeks prior to Christmas because they were always my favorite songs when I was little.
We would also read lots of Christmas books around Christmas time. There is also a really fantastic picture book called “Auntie Claus” that X would probably love. It’s adorable and well-illustrated and written.
Another thing we have always done is drive to a neighborhood that has good Christmas lights (there are a few in the area I’m sure we could point you to) and look at them from the car.
We do some super dodgy gingerbread houses with the kids that involve small shoe boxes that they frost and then stick candy and stuff on. It’s easy and they end up looking ridiculously horrible which I kind of love.