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My Favorite Christmas Traditions

Christmas is such a special time of year, there is so much family time!  I look forward to our special traditions every year, they make the season for me.  I wanted to share some of our traditions with you, just for the fun of it.

Christmas Baking:  Every year my sister, mom and I get together one Saturday after Thanksgiving to make a whole bunch of goodies to snack on for the season.  We meet around 9 a.m. and dig right in melting, stirring, mixing, dropping by spoonful and baking.  These last few years the kiddos have been involved and get to help prep (i.e. smash Oreos, pretzels, etc.) and decorate sugar cookies.  At the end of the day we divide all of the goodies up and take them home to devour.

Christmas Shopping:  The Saturday after Tgiving my mom, sister and I go shopping together.  We meet nice and early and head up to the big city.  Our first stop is always Target, and it’s always our longest stop.  We may or may not do a lot of goofing off.  We always go out for lunch and my mom always pays (but says it’s Dad who’s paying, cracks us up).  We shop till we drop and till our feet feel like they’re falling off.  It’s always a hoot of a day, lots of laughs and lots of money spent.  And it seems we always end up doing a little shopping for ourselves along the way.

Watching Christmas Movies: Andy and I started this before having the boys.  Every weekend leading up to Christmas (after Tgiving) we watch at least one movie.  Our “top of the list” movies are ‘White Christmas’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.  We also enjoy ‘Scrooged’, ‘A Christmas Carol’ (the Jim Carey animated version) and ‘Christmas Vacation’, to name a few.  Sprinkle in the cartoon shows – ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’, ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘Prep and Landing’, and my most favorite of all, ‘Garfield Christmas’. 

Wrapping Presents:  I (most years) love to wrap presents and make them look as pretty as possible.  And part of that tradition is handing them to the boys to put under the tree. They love helping with that.

Going to visit Santa:  Our Santa is so great, he always teases the boys! “What do you GIRLS want this year?”  They giggle every time! 

Tree Hopping:  My mom’s family’s annual tradition of going house to house seeing everyone’s trees and decorations and eating some good food.  It’s an awesome afternoon of just being together without presents.  Isn’t that what the holidays should be about?

Andy’s Gifts:  Every year – EVERY YEAR- I beg Andy to open just one of his presents.  I get so excited to give him his gifts that I can’t hardly stand the wait!!  And every year his will power wins out and he says no.  But we get a kick out of it anyway!

To and From:  Another tradition of Andy;s and mine is addressing each other’s gifts to names other than our own.  It all depends on what’s happened that year, who was famous, what TV shows we watched, what tickled our fancy.  It’s just as fun seeing how they are addressed as what is inside them.

These are just a few of our many traditions.  All of our traditions are super special to me, I hope they’ll be special to the boys as they get older, too.

Merry Christmas!

Erin

5 comments:

  1. You have so many great traditions!
    I love that you want Andy to open a gift early. I'm the same way with Scott!

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  2. I want to bake :) I never do! :(

    That is so funny that you guys address your gifts to someone else. That sounds fun!

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  3. I am going to have you do some baking for me! That is the one thing that I just don't enjoy doing.

    I love that Andy won't open his presents. I am just the opposite. I hate surprises, so I would want to open mine all right away.

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  4. You have some great traditions!!! I think that is something we haven't done very good at. I want to have some traditions especially as J gets older and really knows what is going on. I probably should get on that!!! LOL :)

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  5. What great traditions!! They make the holidays so much fun!

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