Happy Friday! I’m linking up with Kelly to share some of our Christmas traditions. I love creating new traditions in our family (and continuing some from my childhood) and it’s even more fun with kiddos!
For the past several years (I’ve lost track but it was before Will was born, so over four years), we have participated in an annual cookie day at our neighbor’s mom’s house. Nana, our neighbor’s mom, is also our babysitter, and her husband, Pops, are like a third set of grandparents to our kiddos.
Anyway, each year, we head to Nana’s for a day of cookie baking and decorating. Nana begins baking by eight each morning and we usually don’t finish until after five. We make cookie dough and bake it there, but a lot of us make dough ahead of time. This year, I made three batches of a family recipe called Sandies, a shortbread chocolate chip cookie. I also made a triple batch of brown butter snickerdoodles, one of my favorite cookies! The brown butter gives the cookie such a unique taste. It’s much easier for me to make the dough ahead of time, especially since Will and Harper come with me.
Will loved decorating the cookies this year and was so excited that we had orange colored frosting, his favorite color!
Here’s a small sampling of the cookies we made. A few years back, we kept track of how many cookies we baked…it was over 1,700!!
When I was little, my parents took us out driving to look at Christmas lights. My husband and I have continued this tradition with Will and Harper. The other evening, I put Will and Harper in their Christmas pajamas and we drove to a local park, which has a fun display of lights each year. Miss H. fell asleep a few minutes into the drive but Will loved seeing all the cool light displays! One of my favorites was this hay bale teddy bear.
For my son’s first Christmas, I bought a personalized ornament from Lisa Leonard Designs. I love her jewelry and decorations and decided to continue buying a special ornament every year for each kiddo. This is a new tradition for us since my husband and I didn’t have an ornament each year when we were young. Now Will has four ornaments (yikes, he’s getting so big!) and Harper has two. The gingerbread ornaments were last year’s selection.
Since I grew up on a Christmas tree farm, it was a given that we headed outside to select a tree each year. My husband used to go to a tree farm as a kid but his parents eventually got an artificial tree. This is one of my favorite traditions! We go to a local farm that is owned by one of my former co-worker’s family.
I buy Will and Harper Christmas jammies each year. Here they are sporting this year’s pajamas:) In order to get as much wear out of the pajamas as possible, they start wearing them right after Thanksgiving.
In addition to our cookie day, we help my dad make sand tarts each year. Sand tarts are a family recipe-a thin sugar cookie that you brush with an egg wash and sprinkle with cinnamon/sugar or red and green sprinkles. For the past several years, Will has helped us decorate the cookies.
My husband and I were discussing our family holiday traditions the other evening. He grew up with the presents under the tree prior to Christmas. In my family, none of the gifts were under the tree until that morning. His stocking gifts were unwrapped; mine were always wrapped. It’s so fun to learn what types of traditions we had growing up and merge the two with our own family. What are some of your favorite traditions?
Harper and Will 