3 Christmas Traditions

When I was a new mom I heard Amy Davis, from Inspiring Moms, speak about creating traditions in your family.  I love a good tradition, and I obsessively started to think about what traditions I would start with my little family.

Christmas is an easy time to start traditions...it's just that sort of holiday.  Mike and I decided we wanted to make the month of December family focused.  It's so easy to make it about parties, gifts, and the schedule. Last year we started the advent envelope countdown...and this year, Luke asked when we got to start the envelopes!  (Yay!!!  A family tradition!!!)

Tradition 1!  I decorate envelopes with fun paper and number them 1-24.  In each envelope I put a short activity for us to complete each day.  The activities vary from making a Christmas craft to family movie night.  It is not anything super complicated, and we make it work with our schedule.  For example, Ryan had a Christmas program at school, so that was our activity for the night.  Our goal is to make sure that it is not an added stress to the month!

Christmas Countdown begins!

I hang the envelopes around our dining room door way...and as you can see the boys were excited to begin!  My favorite part of the tradition is taking a picture of whatever we did with the envelope.  I then make it into a photo book!  I set our book out from last year, and we all loved looking through it!  

Our family at Ryan's Christmas program!  8 days until Christmas!

Tradition #2!  One of our activities involves going to see Santa.  We always get a photo and frame it.  I have an individual photo of each child on their first Christmas and then the family photos.  I then started framing the photos and displaying them.  It is so fun to see the kids with Santa through the years!

It's small...but you get the idea!  Our Santa pictures!

Tradition #3!  We started "Elf on a Shelf" this year after Luke saw it at a friend's house.  It was a fun addition to the month!  Our elf is named Dash, and the kids were very excited to see what he was up to when they woke up in the morning.  He never did anything naughty...we figured our kids didn't need any help dreaming of naughty things to do!