Who doesn’t love traditions? I love, love love them! I feel it can make certain times of year extra special and also it helps keep you on track to do certain things you love.
There is something special about carrying out old traditions that you had with your family when you were a child and even carrying them out to your kids. However, I also love creating new traditions in our home, something that is unique just to us.
Christmas is a great time of year to do family traditions, here are a few of the old and new ones we do at our household.
Old Traditions
- Photo with Santa
- Sponsoring a family
- Christmas baking
Since I was a little kid, going to visit Santa and take a picture has been a Christmas tradition. This year we actually went to visit Santa on Christmas Eve ( i know…late), but I kind of loved it! I feel that it made it extra exciting for my daughter as she knew he was flying back to the North Pole later that day to get the presents ready for delivery. Another bonus was there were zero lines and they let us just take photos with our own camera at zero cost. I think everyone was a little more laid back and extra jolly since it was the day before Christmas! We also visit Santa in a mall, and there is something magical about the mall on Christmas Eve in my opinion.
Sponsoring a family has been something my family has done for the last 10 years and I carried over this tradition to my own family. This is done through a local company called LifeSpin but there are many different programs in each city. Basically we sign up for a family less fortunate to sponsor, get their family wish list and do some Christmas shopping for them. Its one of my favorite feel-good things to do and doesn’t require a big budget. It’s also a great thing to do with a group of people where you can pool your money to support larger or multiple families. We would do this as a family once my brother and I got older, but didn’t have any kids on our own instead of us all buying for each other. Since now my brother and I have kids, my family buys for the kids but my immediate family has continued the tradition with sponsoring a smaller family on our own.
Christmas baking is just a MUST for me over the holidays. I don’t bake a lot throughout the year but do I ever in the month of December. I usually participate in a cookie exchange and also do some baking on my own. This year I was able to have my daughter involved which was a lot of fun. On Christmas Eve we put some of the cookies we baked into little boxes with Christmas cards and drop them off in the neighbor’s mailboxes. This has gone a long way with my neighbors, and since we don’t see each other all the time ( we live in the country), it reminds them how I wish well for them and appreciates them. And trust me, when we get 40 inches of snow and they come by with their snowplow, It’s totally worth that cookie drop off once a year 🙂
New Traditions
- Gift and food for the Ronald McDonald House
- Reindeer food on Christmas Eve
- Photo yearbook
This year we started a new tradition with my family. Over the past few years, I have tried to volunteer where I can with the Ronald McDonald House here in London, Ontario. Its an incredible organization and if you have one near you, I strongly suggest you get involved. The house is fully run-off volunteers and donations and at Christmas time they have a wish list of items the house can use to help keep things running. We went out and did a grocery trip for basic pantry items to help support meals served at the house. I also had my daughter pick out 1 toy that she wanted to donate to the treasure room. This is a room in the house where kids get to go into and pick anything they want. Its usually for kids before they start chemo or go into a serious surgery. It was really special explaining this to my daughter, showing her around the house, and having her involved in the process of giving back.
On Christmas Eve we have always done the traditional milk, cookies, and carrots left out for Santa and his reindeers. This year my incredible daycare provider made reindeer food for the kids to sprinkle on their porch on Christmas eve. It was a mix of cinnamon, all-bran cereal, cocoa powder, and sparkles. My daughter loved putting this on our porch and around the house. We 100% will carry on this new tradition in our family.
The photo yearbook is something new we started doing a few years ago. As much as I love how everything is mobile now, I hate it because I had no hard copies of pictures. The days of printing out pictures are behind us, maybe we do the odd one for a picture frame at home. Everything is stored on our computers or a hard drive somewhere but usually in a place where we cant go back and look at them easily. After Christmas every day, we upload all of our photos from our phone and make a photo book using shutterfly.com! We have a bookshelf in our living room where we add our family yearbook to it each year. Its a nice tangible item to have forever, pass on to family and also kids LOVE looking at them. They think its a hoot to go back and look at themselves as babies.
XO
B