Christmas Traditions

Since it is Christmas Eve I thought a would share my family’s favorite Christmas traditions with you. We have a few and through the years some of them have been modified to fit our growing and changing lifestyle. A fun one was buying, hiding, and wrapping my daughters’ gift. Waking up in the middle of the night and being extra quiet so we could place the gifts brought by Santa under the tree without waking her up. This was fun it was like our own Elf caper mission. This tradition has long passed, these days the roles have reversed and the one playing elf is my daughter. She goes shopping with dad and does all the gift wrapping for him. My longest-standing tradition is to get my Christmas gift shopping done by Thanksgiving, I began this 24 years ago. I start my Christmas gift shopping on the first of October and I am usually done by Thanksgiving. Although these days I do much of my shopping online which makes it even better. I avoid the crowds, the traffic, and the lugging of heavy packages. The gifts arrive at my door and as they come in they get wrapped and stored until the weekend after Thanksgiving when they are placed by the Christmas tree. This brings me to a few other traditions, No Christmas decorations until the day after Thanksgiving! On that Friday, we put away all the Fall Decorations and put up all our outdoor Christmas decorations. On Saturday we put up the tree and on Sunday we (the whole family) decorate the tree. It is also traditional to have pizza on the night that we trim the tree.

Next is the tradition that is the most special to me, baking with my daughter. We set aside a day during the holidays to bake treats and decorate cookies and we have even done a few gingerbread houses throughout the years. We have been doing this since she was three years old. Which got me thinking about what is her favorite tradition for the holidays, so I asked. Her answer was quick and did not take any time to think. Her favorite is Christmas morning. At Christmas, we make our traditional panettone french toast breakfast then gather around the Christmas tree to exchange gifts. I must agree with her, I love this one too. I must admit that what makes these traditions and all the other ones we have special is the time that we spend together as a family and the memories that we created while we enjoy our Holiday season.