To steal your Christmas traditions

[HappyMamma2023]

Hi everyone. Our son is 20 months. Last year was his first Christmas and it was nice but he was too young to understand. Now he's older and at nursery, he's much more excited and it feels like a special Christmas this year, having him help put the tree up, dancing to Christmas songs and seeing his smile when we turned the Christmas lights on 💖 Please post your Christmas traditions which I will blantently steal. Thank you and Merry Christmas!

When mine were small I took them to a children's Carols by Candlelight at church on Christmas Eve. It was a lovely family atmosphere. Then home for bath and pjs, followed by reading the Night Before Christmas by the fire before bed.

Now they're grown up, we do a garden centre tour early in December, usually a light trail, make and decorate biscuits/gingerbread house, go to the Christmas tree farm together to choose the tree, and watch a Christmas film together (sometimes it's just me and DS1 watching Die Hard). It's so hard to coordinate everyone's schedules that these events are marked on the calendar in November.

This year DP is driving us into London to do a tour of the lights, then go to Smithfields in the wee small hours for the Christmas meats 😁New tradition unlocked!

We each get £10 to buy a family secret Santa gift that we open Christmas Eve then eat pizza and watch TV. I love it!

we also always read the night before Christmas......though I'm sure my teens don't want to 😂

@AhBiscuits
We're not religious but still go to Christingle and the kids join in with the nativity. The lovely ladies at the church seem to enjoy the packed church and I'm sure wouldn't be too upset that they have atheist imposters. We always leave some cash on the collection plate.

I loved reading this AhBiscuits.

On behalf of all the other "lovely ladies" 🙂 who volunteer for kids' church services, yes, we do love to see the church full.

At every church I've ever been to, visitors are hugely welcome.

There is no need to have faith before you come to church. Maybe you'll find it there. Maybe you won't, but the church is warm and there's coffee afterwards. Maybe you need a sit down, or something fun and free for the kids. All welcome.

Church belongs to everyone. You're not just guests, you've got the right to be there.

Our Santa has gingerbread, originally some attempt at agingerbread house, but it collapsed every year. It then became very small gingerbread houses and some gingerbread people and last year the kids created something they dubbed "the cult of christmas" which was a collection of gingerbread tents and people and trees. I look forward to what nonsense they create this year 😂

I strongly advise starting the tradition of the stocking being downstairs nr the fireplace and not in the children's bedroom.

This will safe you so much painful creeping around over the next 15 years

We had helium balloons one for each of the four children tied to the back of the chair at the dining table. There was usually an argument about who was having which balloon when they appeared on Christmas Eve. The tradition started when our eldest was 2. They are now all late 20's early 30's and none of them live at home, but insist we still have the balloons. The grandchildren take one home each now and the spare one usually stays until it eventually deflates.

There's something a bit weird about trying to create a tradition. They should be something that happens organically otherwise it's all a bit forced.

But if it's ways of doing things you want to know about then then I would always go with the way it was when I was small and how we do it now; Father Christmas brings stockings only. Just little bits in an actual stocking. Everything else is from whoever it's from and doesn't need to be hidden, presents can go under the tree whenever they are wrapped and ready. Makes it far less stressful than the situations I hear about on here.

My LO is five. This year she was really excited about getting her Christmas Duvet set out and decorating the table. Decorating the table was something we did on Xmas Eve/Xmas day but this year she was insistent those decorations came out on the 1st and she remembered clearly where everything went. As she’s just started reception her handwriting skills have progressed massively since Sept, she’s made a name tag for every family member and we now have to sit in our designated seats 😂

Absolutely love this idea!

When mine were old enough I'd read The Dark is Rising to them as a bedtime story on the run up to Christmas.

Christmas baking - a cake, mince pies (I like a streusel topping on some) and Christmas biscuits.

Going to the garden centre and picking out a decoration each for the tree, or for their own tree when they had one.

Writing Christmas cards for their friends.

Writing a letter to Santa and posting it.

The kids taking one side of the car each on a drive and counting the number of Christmas lights they passed to see who would 'win'.

New pyjamas to open on Christmas eve and go to bed in, so you can spend the morning opening pressies wearing your new pj's 😊 Some people also do this as part of a Christmas eve box now, my family just did pyjamas before Christmas eve boxes were a thing and I've carried it on for my son.

Not sure if it’s been mentioned as haven’t read whole tread but we do a bookvent so I wrap up 24 of books we have in the house, some Christmas ones some not and number them all, the kids take it in turn to open a book a night and we read it together. Simple but brings us all a lot of pleasure.

We make a gingerbread house from scratch and decorate it with sweets on Christmas Eve and display it in a little fairylight illuminated nook in the kitchen. Then, on New Years Eve, the boys smash it up and eat what they want of it. They don't usually eat very much of it - ends up being more of a tasting session. Other traditions have come and gone, but this one has endured!
Our other pretty constant Christmas tradition is putting cloves in oranges and having little groups of them dotted around - boys have already asked when we are doing it this year ❤️

Ours is a bit random, but we play a game on Christmas Eve where I hide a pickle decoration on the tree and DS/DD have to each find it in a race against DH. The winner gets a present (just something small). We even have the pickle on a tree song that we made up and sing before we play it. I think the pickle on a tree comes from USA or Germany tradition, I'm not sure.

He's still a bit young, but we do a Christmas / winter mural on our French doors with finger paints every year...
it's messy and a pain to clean but the DC love it so much that now at ages 15 & 20 they still do it

We make handprint baubles every couple of years, dead easy and looks lovely on the tree. Simply paint DSs little hand with (safe) paint and give them a bauble to hold for a second, it leaves a little handprint.
Tbh we don't worry so much about the neatness of it all, but DS and DDs love seeing their handprints over the years (and DS15 even did us another one this year lol).

Yup. When older Geraint is looking out the window and can still hear them singing. I think it's that sense of moving up the family tree and so many people from Christmases past now being among the "voices that I hear just before sleep". I just get such a sense of order and peace from it which is strange given how troubled its writer was.

Picking a new bauble for the tree from each child. I saw a lovely idea on Instagram of taking a picture of each one & saving it in a scrapbook / digital photo album that I'm going to start this year.

Making pizzas on Christmas Eve.

Making handprint art to display every year. Last year was Christmas tree prints, this year we made a wreath of all our hands.

Family service at church on Christmas Eve, the one day of the year we go to church.

While we’re at church one of my friends or our next door neighbour drops the Christmas Eve box on our doorstep from the elves so it’s there when we get home. My boys scream every year in amazement. Just new PJs, choc
santa, bath bomb and a new Christmas book each year.

We always book the “big” panto in our nearest city for the Sunday before Christmas. We all go into the city for the day, wander round the Christmas markets, we pick a new ornament or bauble each year, loosely based on whichever panto we’ve seen. A fairy tea light for when we saw Peter Pan etc.

Sunday afternoons in December are always a Christmas film and hot chocolate.

We watch a Xmas movie and eat snacks on Xmas eve. We put the tree up when ever one of us cracks - it will be tonight! Santa fills DDs stocking and provides a small number of presents (wrapped differently) everything else comes from me or family. We do a family trip to the pantomime before Xmas. Other than that we steer away from traditions as it just makes extra work for me at Xmas. We do lots of nice things like days out, light viewings etc.. but none as a tradition.

My kids are 2 and 5. We always drive around town after teatime on the day that everyone breaks up from nursery/school/work and look at the Christmas lights.

We go to Christingle on Christmas Eve at the church up the road from us. We then have a big Polish-style Christmas Eve celebration, as that's where my family is from. This involves a big meal (no meat or dairy) and then opening presents from family, so obviously quite different to most UK-style Christmases and maybe not one you'd want to adopt!

We do still have "English Christmas" on Christmas Day which involves stockings for the DC, church on Christmas morning (only time DH comes to church all year), and going to my in-laws' for the big Christmas meal and to exchange gifts with them.

Make your own Christmas pudding. Even a toddler can get into stirring it.

We had a tradition of making enough biscuits to last until Easter. Not sure they ever did but we made a lot of biscuits that were only made at Christmas.

Download Box of Delights from iplayer so you have it every year.

On Christmas Eve, to calm the over excitement, we drove round looking at peoples Christmas lights in the dark. DC in new pjs and slippers, we put blankets, hot chocolate in a flask, DC had new mugs and sweet treats and we'd stop x snack in the car, all snuggly. They're now 26, 27, 30 and still talk about it. We did it again 3 years ago. Great fun.

Thank you everyone. So many ideas! I'm trying to read them all 🎄🎅🎁