As the festive season rolls round every year, our traditions also come out. Most families have traditions and many do the same thing every year as part of both the run-up to the 25th December and on the day itself.
One of the most exciting things about setting up home and family with a special someone is finding out their traditions, telling them your own and deciding which you’ll adopt as your own family traditions as you raise your children.
If you’re looking to bring in some new traditions or you’d like some inspiration from other families, I’ve collected some ideas:
Decorations
- Make a new ornament every year using your children’s hand or footprints. You could paint their hands and ask them to hold onto a plain bauble or use salt dough to get an imprint.
- Buy a new decoration each year for each of your children, keeping a note of whose is whose. Then, when they leave your nest to set up their own home, gift their annual decorations to them so they have their own family set.
Shopping
- As you’re doing your own shopping, encourage your children to pick out a toy for a local children’s hospital or charity that they can wrap themselves and take for someone else to have.
- Add a few extra tins to your weekly shop and take a box to your local shelter or food bank a few days before Christmas so it can be distributed
Advent
- Instead of a chocolate Advent calendar, why not choose 24 books and wrap them up individually. The children open one a night and have a new story!
Christmas Eve
- Make a gingerbread house together with sweets as decorations. You can either bake your own if you’re that way inclined, or you can buy a kit with ready-made walls and roof shapes.
- At about 6pm, the International Space Station flies over the UK and appears as a sleigh and reindeer to the magical eyes of children. Why not take a hot drink out into the garden and let the children spot Santa?
- Christmas Eve Boxes are a lovely new idea. You can either make your own with new pyjamas, hot chocolate and a DVD to watch together, or you can buy them ready to go.
- Every year, NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defence) tracks Santa’s journey across the world on a special website here. The reason they do it is almost as magical as the actual journey, and you can find that here.
- Many families go to church on Christmas Eve. The majority of Christmas Eve services are family friendly and children are welcome to sing carols.
- Just before the children are about to go to bed, get them to leave out a glass of milk for Santa, a carrot for the reindeer and sprinkle magical glittery reindeer food on the path so that the reindeer know where to land.
The Big Day
- As a parent, you’ll know how fleeting time is and those magical Christmas mornings don’t last forever. Why not keep a diary of your memories of each Christmas ready to give to your children when they’re older? That way, they can see their Christmas’s as you did?
What does Christmas look like in your home? What are your traditions? I’d love to find out!
