Old Traditions die-hard

I am a stickler for tradition. 

Don’t even get me started on not being able to go home to my parents with the entire family for Christmas Eve & Christmas Day. I guess once you get older, and your siblings get older and start their own families it is customary to spend that time with them. However, I miss the Christmas Eve of a family dinner, board/card/Wii games, hot tub, and lots of drinks.

 So here are a few family traditions I have started in the last few years.

Christmas Ornaments: Every year I take the picture we have used for our Christmas card and turn it into an ornament for our tree. This usually costs $8-$10 and I’m sure in 20 years I’ll be thankful I did this. 

 Stocking Tree: A few years ago I scored a great deal on little pre-lit trees ($10 each!!). So I decided I’d put one upstairs in our hallway and leave our stockings there. Right now with the kids so young it is too dangerous to hang them from the fireplace. Later when they refuse to sleep I don’t have to sneak into their rooms. Also all their ornaments go on that tree so it doesn’t throw off my theme. All around winning.

Christmas Pj’s: In my twenties I would buy all the girls in our family matching Old Navy pj pants to wear on Christmas Eve & morning. Now I have changed that to buying the kids matching pj’s. This is the first year I bought some from Hanna Andersson and I love them! Crazy insanely organized me bought them last January on clearance to make them more affordable. The kids are wearing them in the ornament pic above.

Here are a few traditions I’ve kept:

Glass Christmas tree: My grandmother had a little glass Christmas tree in her house every Christmas and because Grandma is magical and Christmas is magical it is one of my favorite decorations from my childhood. So although I don’t have the original tree, I searched last year until I found an identical one and now hopefully my kids will love it as much as I do.

Cinnamon bread: Some people call it monkeybread. I didn’t know this until I went online to try and find the recipe posted somewhere. For years my mom has made this Christmas morning for our family to have and chaos broke out when we could no longer find the rolls locally. If you have not had these, make them! So easy and so good! They go extremely well with mimosas or baileys’ with a little coffee.

There are also movies and books and… the list goes on. I’ll save that for another post. We do have 21 more to go!