teen christmas

[linconlass]

Have just seen thread re traditions for little ones when having christmas at home- my early teens still love a stocking and help decorate treebut im never sure what do do on christmas day with older kids - idont like games im afraid!! but dont want to have a walk and i dont want wll to wall tv!! and if i suggest walk sometimes great sometimes they just want to stay in .last year had quick walk with dh but felt guilty leavin em !! also what do you do with teens nyeve- one wants to go out the other saty in but id love to be together!! ahhh!!!help !!

Find a film they all will watch (or most of them) with you. Eat chocolate, drink whatever, sleep, snore. Watch TV.

Luckily my older dc's never turned into "kevins", well they are all girls anyway, and love chilling with each other, without friends getting in the way. They really enjoy playing with our younger children, playing with dolls (with youngest dd of course) and making giant kinex models. Because we eat xmas lunch xmas eve the kitchen is free (from me ) on xmas day so they like cooking together, playing Harry Potter cluedo and getting the dance mat out to try and work off what they have eaten, probably followed by a drunken game of twister late in the evening (they are big teens), by which time friends start phoning/turning up and normal hostilities (not really) resume. We are so fortunate that our house is genuinely filled with laughter on Xmas day, really just because they make an effort to keep it that way, thanks girls.

Christmas started to get a bit boring around my teenage years. We do the big family thing with lots of aunts and uncles and cousins and so on but when you were in the stage of only usually getting money rather than presents, after dinner and handing cards out there wasn't much to do.

The year I was fifteen my cousin and I had a bit of a grumble about this, and then decided to do something about it. The next year we began the tradition of the Christmas Quiz. This'll be its eighth year this year, and it's gone from being me and her reading out a list of questions and then reading out the answers and giving out chocolates for prizes, to a great big production involving careful team selections, art & craft rounds, making DVD rounds with photos or videos [last year we got my younger cousin to act out famous movie scenes without any dialogue and they had to guess the movie] and it culminates in a lucky dip of prizes which I buy for a pound each and then rank in terms of naffness. Some of the best/worst have been a handbag disguised as a shoe and a kids' story book called "'Twas the Strike Before Christmas".

Er, my point was, it has been a lot more fun since we got involved and started to jazz it up! Now everyone looks forward to the quiz and we still love making it up, so maybe you could get them to think of things they could organise for the family to do. Even something simple, like a treasure hunt for gifts [one year my aunt made us all different plasticine models - mine was a whale - and then gave us clues as to what we were looking for and where it might be. When we found the model we got our card].