Christmas Traditions: Part One
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Are you looking for Christmas traditions ideas to add to your holiday this December? Christmas traditions kids will love and Christmas traditions family will want to do again and again are so important! Check out these 5 family Christmas traditions to start and add new Christmas activity ideas to your family traditions!
Homemade Advent Calendar
There’s no better way to build excitement for the season than with an advent calendar. Many are familiar with the terrible chocolate advent calendars from the drugstore but there’s no reason you can’t improve upon the tradition!
Advent calendars are readily available at most stores this time of year. You can buy prefilled calendars (you can find them for everything from chocolate to jam to very expensive perfume), make your own to fill year after year, or print out a calendar to write down ideas.
Here are some ideas to get you started if you’d like to DIY something!
Make or buy a pocket calendar. Fill it with your favorite candies, small wooden toys, toy cars, or ornaments for the tree.
Make a tree out of felt with 24 felt ornaments and hang one every day
Make an activities calendar with 24 different ways to celebrate! They don’t have to be big activities, they can be as simple as make a Christmas song playlist to listen to before bed.
Wrap up 24 books and open one each night! I get new to us books used or when I see a good deal to wrap up. You could also use library books or books you already own!
Kindness Secret Agents
At the beginning of the season, have everyone in your family pick a name from the hat. You are now that person’s Kindness Secret Agent! Your mission is to spread holiday cheer, help out, and make your target’s spirits bright-all while trying not to get caught!
Depending on the size of your family or their ages, you may want to pick new names every day, every week, or stick with the same name until Christmas!
If you have a nativity in your home, have each participant write down their acts of kindness on little yellow slips of paper. These can be placed in the manger as hay for baby Jesus when he arrives!
Decorate the Same Day Each Year
I like to decorate the day after Thanksgiving. I would keep my house decorated for Christmas all year round if it was acceptable but doing it right after Thanksgiving gives me plenty of time to celebrate and appreciate our decor. We leave our decor up until Epiphany and then slowly take it down throughout that week.
Decorating for Christmas can be so intimidating, especially if you’ve never done it before. Here are my tips to make it less overwhelming and MUCH easier on your budget.
Decide on your budget before the season starts. Knowing whether you have $20 or $200 to spend makes a big difference in your focus!
Build your holiday decor collection yearly. Focus on garland one year, bows the next, bathroom decor the following year. It makes it much less overwhelming than thinking you need to build your whole collection at once.
Start a collection. Maybe it’s cute birds from Target, nutcrackers, or snow globes. Buying one or two every year (especially after Christmas when they’re on sale!) can be a great way to decorate in a way that’s meaningful for you.
Focus on one room at a time, starting with the room you spend the most time in. If you have a small amount of decor, use it to decorate your living or family room only.
I’ve mentioned this already but shop for decor after Christmas. Things can be 70-90% off!
Make as much decor as you can! Making decor together is another fun Christmas activity and will be far more meaningful than something you buy at the store. Save your delivery boxes, wrap them up, and stick them around the house as decor! Cut up paper for snowflakes! Paint cardboard winter wonderland scenes, make cardboard trees, make cardboard gingerbread houses!
Use nature! Pinecones and holiday branches make wonderful holiday decor. Dry oranges and string them up with cranberries. Make a stovetop potpourri to make your whole house smell magical.
Christmas Boxes
This is one of my favorite traditions. Our Elf on the Shelf brings them now but when it was just my husband and I we opened them Christmas Eve morning. It felt too rushed so we moved the tradition to the day after Thanksgiving to kick off the season!
Thanksgiving night, we put matching Christmas pajamas, an ornament, a book, and game in our Christmas boxes to open the next morning. Our elf delivers the boxes and we put on our jammies to take our Christmas card photo.
You could put whatever you wanted in your boxes but I really love matching pajamas and an ornament. It’s a festive way to kick off the holiday season!
Elf on the Shelf
I’m sure everyone has heard of Elf on a Shelf by now so I won’t spend too much time on it. Love it or hate it, kids love Elf on a Shelf. My best advice for making this tradition stick is to get organized before the first night you have to hide the elf.
Number a piece of paper from 1 to however many nights you’re hiding the elf (we hide ours Thanksgiving night so the number varies). Write down your ideas. Try your best not to put more than two “difficult” ideas in a row. You don’t want to be freezing the elf one night and having him hover over the toilet the next (unless you really love doing this, in which case go for it!). At the bottom of the page, write 5 zero energy ideas (watching TV, sitting on a rocking horse etc.) for those days your best laid plans fall short. Tape the list to the top of a box and gather all of the materials you may need and put them inside. Now you’re set for the season!
If you have older children who are ready to get in on the Elf on a Shelf magic or live with roommates or a partner, draw days of the week and divide the responsibility for hiding the elf. It keeps things fresh and if there’s more than 2 people, every day will be a surprise!