Holiday Traditions

junebugrbig

The holidays are around the corner and I am excited!  Do you all have any special traditions for the holidays?  Most of our traditions center around Christmas Eve.  We drive around and look at Christmas lights.  We come home and sprinkle reindeer dust outside.  Then we leave cookies and milk for Santa.  Kids love it!!

neverblushed

We are really crazy for Christmas in my home.  If I listed all our traditions, it would take too long to read.  So I'll just list two that we do every year, but I'm particularly excited about this year:

DH and I have been collecting Christmas music since we first started living together.  We load the stereo (now mp3 player too) on Thanksgiving Friday and listen to nothing but Christmas music until New Year's Day.  The first song we play every year is Queen's "Thank God It's Christmas!"  It always makes me cry, because I'm always so happy it's the Christmas season again!  

We always get our tree on the 2nd Saturday of December.  Everyone who's going (usually DH's parents, siblings, a handful of friends) meets at our house.  We all wear Santa hats and/or nutty Christmas sweaters.  We go to the tree farm and get our trees, then all the kids scamper around and ride the hayrides while the adults have a tailgate party.  We've been doing this for years, and the family who owns the tree farm knows us now, and calls us "the crazy tailgating family."  Then everyone comes back to our house and we eat chili and hang out.  On Sunday, DH and the kids and I decorate the tree.  We always get a GIGANTIC tree, and it seriously takes all day to decorate.

This year, it's going to be complicated because DS has a major karate competition on that Saturday, and DD has placement testing for the IB program on Sunday.  So we'll have a totally busy weekend, but I'm really excited!!

mhwood

On Christmas Eve, we order Chinese Food and open a "family" present that includes new pjs for everyone, a new Christmas movie, hot chocolate, popcorn, and a new book for everyone.

On Christmas morning, the kids wake up the parents.  The "Santa" gift is always open and assembled waiting under the tree with full stockings.  The kids are able to play with the "Santa" gift and open their stockings while the parents get coffee and throw on breakfast (we make a casserole that bakes while we open gifts).  Then, we open gifts, one at a time from youngest to oldest. After open gifts, we relax and eat breakfast before getting ready to go to a family member's house for dinner.

On Boxing Day, we eat leftover Chinese food for lunch and head to the other side of the family for dinner and Christmas there.