I am still in recovery mode from all of the Holy Week and Easter services last week, so let’s do something fun and light for this post, okay? Here are my family’s favorite holiday traditions, list-style. We keep tweaking and adding but these have stuck. Over the years, I have learned that less is more. The easier something is to implement, the more likely I am to maintain it (that means that the adventure-every-day Advent calendar did not have staying power).
We don’t stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve to ring in the New Year. We watch Australia’s or London’s New Year celebration on YouTube, and keep our normal bedtimes, and that works just fine for us.
We use the Story Egg to tell the story of Holy Week and Easter. It is not 100 percent in line with the Episcopal Church’s theology, but it is cute and simple to digest.
We hold Easter Egg Hunts with the neighbors. We are informal about this, but we hide eggs in several backyards and involve the neighborhood kids. The parents enjoy hanging out and watching the kids, and the kids have more fun with the extra element of competition.
I will buy the kids a new green shirt around St. Patrick’s Day, usually from Target. I do this with other small holidays too, like Valentine’s Day or Halloween. They still like matching sometimes.
We have cinnamon rolls on vacation and the first and last days of school (I just use canned).
Each family member chooses what they would like to have cooked for dinner and dessert for their birthday.
I have embraced seasonal decor more with kids. They get into the special wreaths and accessories. I do not go overboard—I have just one small bin per season—but I like seeing how excited they get when a new bin comes out.
We take family photos in the fall. The weather cooperates then, the outdoor backdrop is pretty with the changing leaves, and we have a yearly documentation of how the children are growing and changing.
We do not eat traditional Thanksgiving food on Thanksgiving (gasp). No one in the family really cares for it…and obviously we are not eating the turkey! We make Thanksgiving as low stress as possible, and sometimes travel if we can, since I am gearing up for a busy Christmas and Advent season.
We light an Advent wreath each night in Advent. We usually decorate the pop-up tree in this book too.
We stuff reusable Advent calendars with chocolates. (You can tell that we embrace both the religious and commercial elements of the season.)
We decorate the Christmas tree downstairs with the adult ornaments and a smaller tree upstairs in the playroom with the kids’ ornaments. We usually do this right after Thanksgiving and play music and make hot chocolate, no matter the temperature outside.
I make sugar cookie cutouts one time each year around Christmastime. I find them fussy and time intensive, so that is my limit. Over the years, I have lowered the bar and used store bought dough and just made the icing. I remember loving decorating the cookies with icing and sprinkles as a child, and my kids are the same way.
The kids may open one gift early on Christmas Eve.
The kids receive an ornament every single year to add to their collection, and we put their initials and the year on the bottom of the ornament.
I save certain favorite recipes only for Christmas. These include peanut butter chocolate buckeyes, homemade Chex Mix, salted pretzel toffee, and mint Oreo truffles only appear at Christmastime and then we must wait until next year!
The kids wait for me to finish services to open presents. This is part of being a PK. They held off until lunchtime on their Easter baskets this year, and they sleep in on Christmas morning (or wait upstairs watching a movie) so I can get some sleep after the midnight service. This is just part of our rhythm now.
Like so many, we have jumped on the matching holiday pajamas train. We do not purchase new ones every year if the previous year’s still fit (and I usually buy them a size up so we can get a couple of years out of them), but it is cute to see everyone coordinated. The kids stay in pajamas all day on Christmas.
The adults all stuff each others’ stockings. I like that this does not fall on one person (because let’s be real, that person is usually Mom!).
We turn on the fireplace, no matter how hot it is outside. Isn’t it funny how we do some things just to complete the picture we have in our mind? Christmas is supposed to be cozy but the fireplace, even if it is 70 degrees outside.
We create seasonal Spotify playlists and listen to the music while cleaning up the kitchen at night or getting ready in the morning. My husband Dan and I expose them to some old classic songs, and we mix in some of the kids’ requested songs too. Particular songs have become associated with a time of year for us now.
Most of these are simple, but you can bet that my children know them by now and remind me if I forget. What are your family’s favorite traditions? If you have any good ones to share, please let us know in the comments!