Do you guys have traditions around the holidays? Traditions are some of my favorite things in the world. Not everyone is dedicated to making sure they happen every year, but that’s 60% of the fun for me!
I also love hearing about other family traditions. I’m sharing some of my favorite traditions here and would love to hear what you and your family/friends do in a comment:
1. Getting matching Christmas pajamas has to be one of my favorite traditions. Some of the years we plan ahead and others we scramble at the mall a day or two before Christmas. (At that point you never know what you’re going to get, but it’s still fun.)
2. On Christmas Eve, my family goes out to dinner. We normally do some kind of Chinese or Thai restaurant, but we have reservations this year for one of our usual favorite restaurants.
3. My dad and his side of the family are Jewish and this year is an official “Chrismukkah” with Hanukkah starting on Christmas Eve. We typically mesh the two holidays anyway, but since this year there’s real overlap, it’ll be extra fun. I think we’re having the family over on Christmas day to celebrate.
4. On Christmas morning, my mom makes an egg casserole and we have a really slow morning. We definitely had crazier Christmas mornings as kids, but I think we were never camping out under the tree and waking up at the crack of dawn. I way prefer the super slow morning where we take our time drinking coffee and eating breakfast together.
5. Once we’re ready, we open one gift at a time taking turns between everyone. Normally my mom has the most gifts from friends (haha), but it’s fun to see what everyone gets. There’s also only four of us and this extends the whole unwrapping time by a bit!
6. With our extended family, we instituted a $2 gift rule. Honestly, this is the most fun and $2 is REALLY hard to shop for. Everyone spends the year trying to find the perfect, most creative, funniest, biggest-bang-for-your-buck $2 gift. We’ve been doing this for years and I think with inflation we allow $3….. My mom always gets everyone scratch off lottery tickets. So fun!!
7. When everyone is over we pull out games (Mad Gab and Yahtzee are always our favorites). It tends to get extremely competitive, but we all still laugh hysterically. Except, of course, when someone is gloating about their third Yahtzee of the round.
8. And we end the night with s’mores out by the firepit. I think this year we’ll also get the movie theater set back up so we can watch movies while we eat the s’mores!
Okay, dying to know what some of your favorite traditions are!
My family is always traveling for Christmas, so it’s always a different thing, but I suppose traveling is our tradition! // So… I recently started watching The OC for the first time because one of my professors kept making references to it in class, and I learned about Chrismukkah that way 😛 The yamaclaus was very creative! // I don’t doubt that the $2 rule is a challenge! Sounds fun though 😀 -Audrey | Brunch at Audrey’s
Holiday traditions are something I look forward to every year! Until this year I had little brothers who still believed in Santa so we would make “reindeer food” to sprinkle outside and set out cookies for Santa.
On Christmas morning we take turns opening gifts ( there’s 8 of us so this takes a while) and then we finish with a big breakfast including homemade cinnamon rolls that I have made the past few years.
Holiday traditions are harder now that I am married, we have to split our time between 2 families, but I try to take part in as many of the traditions as I can.
Taylor Cannon | http://www.livingtaylored.com
We always have cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Christmas morning. Don’t know why or when that started – but for me, that’s the perfect Christmas morning and it feels incomplete without them! I totally agree that family traditions are the most fun part about the holiday season!
I just made cinnamon rolls yesterday (http://sugarspunrun.com/easy-cinnamon-rolls-no-yeast-required/) and I think I’m going to make them on Christmas!
My family also opens one present at a time – it’s not bad when there’s only the three of us but when we have extended family visiting it can take upwards of four hours! Another tradition we’ve always had is our pickle ornament: every year since I was a kid, my parents hide it somewhere in the tree and I have to find it on Christmas Eve to open one “sneak-peek” present. As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten significantly more challenging – the ornament is usually hidden somewhere inside the tree.
This year, we’ll be in London for Christmas, so it’ll be a bit harder to stick to some of our traditions, especially since we’re doing all of our presents before we leave!
On Christmas Eve our extended family comes to our house for dinner. We always do Christmas crackers. Everyone wears their crown and reads their joke. We laugh at the prizes and have so much fun with it. Breakfast on Christmas morning is always ham biscuits. Merry Christmas!
These all sound so wonderful! My family has changed a bit over the years but we still do slow christmas mornings and end the day with board games and a movie!
I love hearing about other family traditions! For us, we start Christmas Eve with mass and then we come home for dinner. Every year, dinner is a make your own sandwich spread! We get Christmas jammies to wear to bed that night and when we wake up in the morning, there’s a book wrapped in our rooms, a throwback to our parents wanting to keep us in our room until 8 on Christmas morning! We do the same as you with opening one present at a time, followed by a breakfast of croissants that have been baking all morning. Thanks for sharing your traditions, happy holidays!
We also do Christmas jammies and slow Christmas mornings, alternating opening each other’s gifts.
My mom used to put a strip of painter’s tape at the end of my hallway before I went to bed on Christmas Eve, marking the spot where I couldn’t go until everyone was up and ready to open presents. I’m married and live in my own house now, but she still puts a strip of tape on the threshold of the front door for when we arrive Christmas morning. 🙂
Cinnamon rolls! My mom makes homemade cinnamon rolls using her bread maker with a recipe she’s had ever since I can remember, and uses one of my grandmother’s sheet cake pans to line them up, let them rise and then bake them as we open our stockings! They’re ready to go right when we get hungry. This year I’ll be coming home from grad school and working on Christmas (patients in hospitals need care every day, even holidays) and my sister is spending the day with her in-laws, so we’re celebrating on Monday and I can’t wait to wake up to those cinnamon rolls again – even if it’s on the 26th!
Our Christmas traditions have changed over the years as we moved from Va to Fl, but one thing that is consistent is that Santa still comes to my house! Santa doesn’t wrap presents, he sets them up around the tree. It’s still fun as an adult to walk into the living room and see a new Tory burch bag or a bose speaker– whatever I got that year! Brings me back to when I’d walk in and see doll houses or a new American girl doll. Thankful my mom still pretends with me, it’s my favorite tradition!!
These sound like so much fun! I love fam traditions for Christmas too 🙂
I love Christmas traditions! My family always watches The Family Stone on Christmas Eve (such a beautiful & funny Christmas movie). We all go for a snowy neighborhood walk to see the lights before bed. Christmas Day starts off with a nice slow morning too before family comes over in the afternoon. I can’t wait! MERRY Christmas Carly!
Ha ha…I love the $2/$3 gift idea. Talk about a challenge!
Ever since I can remember, my family has always done a ‘snack dinner’ on Christmas Eve (meats, cheeses, crackers, and pickles). It’s a tradition that came from my maternal grandmother, I think, because she always tended to buy too much for the Christmas cheese plate, but maybe it was also a good, quick dinner to eat before Mass.
As my brothers and I got older, my mom opened up the dinner to close friends and significant others of my siblings, as well as neighbours. Eventually, my brothers and their friends had kids, so now it’s kind of a free for all where anybody who shows up contributes to the available snacks and the kids watch movies like The Sound of Music and A Muppet Christmas Carol.
Somewhere along the way, onesies and fancy PJs got involved, so that’s the dress code now. I think there’s even a prize for most outrageous onesie, but nobody other than my younger brother has won it, because his lamb onesie takes that cake every year.
My hubs and I aren’t spending Christmas with my family this year, but he’s agreed to hunt down a onesie and do fancy cheese and crackers for dinner so we can Skype in and be part of the wonderful madness. =)
I love that snack dinner– sounds like so much fun!!!
I’m from Florida, and my family always takes a Christmas Day boat ride! It is my favorite tradition. We wake up early for breakfast casserole, then head to the marina to take the boat out for a 45 min – 1 hour spin. Then back home to warm up and open presents!
My Christmas morning sounds a lot like yours! I’m an only child, so it’s just my parents and I, so we always take as long as possible to open our presents. My mom also makes an egg dish (I literally look forward to it every year!!) and monkey bread or cinnamon rolls. Then we head to see our family for a post-brunch mimosa or two, then we spend Christmas evening with our long time family friends. The Dad is Italian so he makes us pizza from his woodburning pizza oven and it’s seriously the best thing ever. I’m so excited for Christmas now!! 🙂 xo Devon Seventeen Dresses
I love my family’s Christmas traditions! On Christmas Eve, family and family friends all come over to my parent’s house for tamales and margaritas. We do presents with them that night, then everyone but my grandmother goes home. Christmas morning, it’s just me, my parents, and my grandmother. We sleep in, take our time with presents, and then have mimosas and fried chicken and waffles. No bug fussy Christmas dinner, just lots of quality time together!! Merry Christmas, Carly!
I love these! I think every family does the holidays in their own way, even if they don’t actively think of them as traditions. Ever since we were tiny my mum has always bought me and my sister pyjamas which we open on Christmas Eve – it started out as a way of making sure we went to bed, but now we’ere 20 and 24 it’s still continued. The only difference is now we pick out the pyjamas instead of Mum! Our other main one is celebrating Twelfth Night/Epiphany, where we all get twelve small gifts to mark the end of the holiday season. The next day my dad chops up the Christmas tree and we all gather round the woodburner in the living room to burn it.
This year we’re trying to instigate a new tradition of going out for high tea on Boxing Day afternoon, which I’m really looking forward to as a chance to get all dressed up!
Have a wonderful Christmas, traditions and all!
Lx | Lightly We Go
My mom is from Louisiana, and every year for Christmas Eve we make sea food creole for dinner. It is one of my favorite traditions! I also especially love going to a candle light Christmas Eve service at church. When my grandparents were alive we would go to their church with my whole family and it just felt so right having everyone together.
Something fun that happens in my house every Christmas is a game of hide and seek with a toy Santa! My mom hides it first and whoever finds it next gets to rehide it and the came continues through Christmas day.
My sister and I do matching Christmas pajamas too and we also do one gift at a time! I hope you and your family are having a wonderful week of Christmas!
Lauren,
http://www.atouchofsoutherngrace.com
OOH! I love reading everyone’s holiday traditions! I have a super small family, so we don’t do anything too crazy. We always go over to my grandma’s house, nap, and watch movies. This year is going to be different though! My boyfriend’s family is visiting, so this will be the first time the parents are meeting! Eek! It was too much for my grandma to handle at her house, so we will all be going out to a nice steak dinner together this year 🙂
xo, Taylor
http://www.taylorashleyblog.com
I LOVE this $2 gift exchange idea. I wonder if I can get any part of my family on-board with it. I don’t even think I have all of their email addresses… hm…