Creating Holiday Traditions

I am trying very hard to create some new Christmas traditions for our family. As my son gets older, I have been able to implement more things and it becomes more and more fun as the years are passing. I know each family has their own traditions, but here are a few of our family’s traditions. Maybe they can become a tradition in your family too!

Growing up, stockings were just for show. We didn’t actually stuff anything into them, so one thing that we did start doing in our family was filling the stockings. When my husband and I were first married, we filled each other’s stockings. It was a lot of fun to do that for each other.

When we had kids, we have noticed that our own stockings have lacked that “star quality” that they once had. Because our daughter was born five days before Christmas this past year, we didn’t even put anything in our stockings. This year, I am trading stockings with a girlfriend. There is a twenty dollar limit and who knows you better than your friends? This should be a fun one to open this year!

One year, in lieu of the little trinkets for the stockings, I put out index cards in a basket with a pen on Thanksgiving Day. Each day, between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas, we would write one thing that we found special about each other. It was fun to see what my son said at two about what he thought about us, and also to see what my husband appreciated most about me.
On Christmas Eve, we got to dive in and read all of our notes to each other. There was definitely a glow about all of us that day!

This year, we are adding two new traditions to our growing list. The first tradition we are adding is filling a jar with twenty-five activities to do between now and Christmas. Things like building a snow man, popping popcorn and watching a movie, making an ornament, going to see the lights in the neighborhoods…basically anything that is free and fun to do. Each day we will draw and do one activity together.

The other tradition that we will be doing is making an advent chain. Taking paper, we will make a chain and number them, to do our own countdown to Christmas. Now that my son is at the age where he is extremely interested in the whole Santa factor and what he is getting, he has already started the, “When is Christmas?” questions. This will hopefully slow down the questions because he will get to tear off each day for the countdown.

If you have special traditions in your home that you would like to share, please leave them in the comments section. Maybe it will inspire others for ideas to add to their family traditions.
Happy holidays, everyone!

Published November 21, 2006 by:

Amy Allen Clark is the founder of MomAdvice.com. You can read all about her here.

comments powered by Disqus