I've been thinking so much about all this -- traditions, the holidays, family, simplicity. Our girls are almost 2 and 7 months and it's wonderful to imagine what kinds of things we'll begin to do every year ... things we're carrying on from our own childhoods, things we're inspired to begin by ideas from friends, things we'll make up ourselves, and others which will probably turn into traditions almost spontaneously without our quite having noticed!
Traditions we've started doing......
~driving around Christmas Eve and looking at all the lights.
~new jammies on Christmas eve.
~Staying in our pjs all day on Christmas
~lighting some candles & the fireplace on Christmas Eve, drinking hot cocoa out of our 'Cousin Eddie' moose mugs while watching Christmas Vacation, snuggled up by the fire
~making a gingerbread house from scratch
~Christmas Brunch at our house (we did this last year, but this year we will be cooking a dinner)
~Read The Night Before Christmas as our bedtime story
Traditions I would love to start........
~stringing popcorn and cranberries for the tree
~making Christmas cookies
with the girls and giving them away as gifts~making tons of paper snowflakes for our windows
~having the girls write letters to Santa and leaving out cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer
~design an avent calendar
that can be stuffed full of all kinds of goodies and candy
~make Thankful Stockings. Each person in our family will have a stocking and we will write specific things we are thankful for about that person and put them in each stocking.
So do tell, what are your favorite holiday traditions with your family???
1 comment:
You have many of the same traditions we have :) We always make a gingerbread house, but this year we made a village and we all made our own house. Maddi and I bake cookies, cookies bars, chocolates, and candies every single year and pass out as gifts on trays. We load them all up in the car and deliver them together :) We drive around looking at Christmas lights but we also do the carriage ride under a blanket and look at lights with hot cocoa. One thing we do every Christmas is go to ToysRUs and the kids pick out a gift that the picked off of our Churches Christmas Tree that they would like to donate to the Toy Drive at our Church. We also go through our old toys and donate them to charities around town. We collect the Hallmark Snowmen books and every year that is the book we read by the fire under a blanket as a family, then somehow the kids always manage to talk me into reading all the others ones from past years as well :) We spend Christmas Eve with his side of the family and roast marshmallows and have a huge dinner and the adults play dirty santa and all the grand kids have a secret santa gift exchange together. We have a santa face with a beard with numbers that count down to Christmas and as the days get closer we put cotton balls on the numbers and on Christmas his beard is complete :) We also do the thankful sayings, except for we go around the table at dinner and tell what each of us is thankful for. We all wear new matching pj's on Christmas Eve as well. Oh and each of my children have their own special Christmas Tree in their room that they decorate by themselves. We also make a new special decoration every year as well, this year we made a new wreath :) Maddi decided that she wanted to make her own craft this year for her room and took old toilet paper rolls and turned them into a cute Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the reindeer! She had found the craft online by googling it :) She had a great time making them and that could be something you do as well with your girls when they get bigger. The boys made homemade snow globes from mason jars.
I hope you have a very special Christmas this year with your family and I pray blessing for the new year!!!
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