Do you have a special Christmas tradition in your family over the festive period or something that you always do and have always done. AO.com challenged me to think about ours recently, it got me all excited for Christmas. Friends of ours all have their “ways” of celebrating Christmas and some of them are so different from ours. It’s amazing how many different things people do for Christmas. We have a few little traditions that go on in our family and if you are just starting out on your journey of parenthood they might come in handy…
Swapping Christmas Day and Boxing Day
Thats right every year we swap Christmas Day and Boxing Day so that we can enjoy Christmas with both sets of families. It is really lovely that we get a Christmas all together with both families at least once every other year. If that makes sense. It is also lovely because the children get two Christmases, quite literally. It can be quite tiring, we spend the best part of three days darting around all over the place to see the people we love. It can be quite exhausting. But it is important to me to at least try and make the effort to see everyone over the festive period.
Christmas Eve goodie crate
We started a new tradition with the little ones a couple of years ago as I thought it would be nice to give the Children a new book to read on Christmas eve, new PJ’s for their Christmas Eve sleep and for the Christmas morning photos in the morning of course and we settle down to watch a new Christmas movie together. After leaving the carrots for the reindeer and a cookie and milk for Father Christmas. It has become our little thing and I love the children’s Christmas Eve crate, I got it personalised and each year they have the same type of gifts within it.
I think Christmas Day is so crazy with little ones that its nice to just take some time over a few goodies the night before, it also helps to ease the anxieties and hype about going to bed. The fact they get to tear open some presents and get it out of their system a little, helps. They still get up at 4:30am at least! I am sure that’s the same for all small children.
Christmas is also for the furbabies
The pets in our house always get Christmas presents too, this year I have gone the whole shebang and the pets have their very own, personalised, stockings. I am very excited to get the fireplace set up in December with all the Christmas goodies and stockings. The cat isn’t too bothered about a stocking, he just loves the wrapping paper balls that we flick around the lounge for him after the events. He loves chasing a paper ball. Snoopy and Rambo love opening presents, they tear off the wrapping paper to reveal the presents inside and are always excited when it’s a squeaky toy or scrummy dog treat.
Do you have nice family Christmas traditions that you do every year? I would love to hear them in the comments below.
IN Belgium we celebrate christmas eve with a dinner, everything about christmas is so very different then the traditional ways in the UK. Back in Belgium i do a big effort keeping some of our british family traditions as well as combining it with Belgian culture. (E.g. We celebrrate saint nicholas on dec 6th instead of father christmas on 25 dec. Good idea about the box though! Was thinking of introducing a birthday box already! a late countrykids visit for last week š
[…] remember as a child, waking up so early and not being able to sleep. It’s a family tradition that I have not been able to shift. Having to sit and wait in my bed until it was a reasonable time […]