Happy Friday! I can’t believe it’s the weekend before Christmas. Honestly, this holiday season has felt both long and short. Since Thanksgiving fell early this year, we seemingly had an extra week of the holidays but that time went by fast.
The holiday season can be exciting, but it can also be hard. And for me, it’s hard in ways that are difficult to talk about on a public blog. Suffice it to say, the holidays look so different from family to family, and there is no one right way to celebrate the season. And if you need to delete Instagram and Facebook from your phone for the next week because the barrage of family photos is too much, I totally, totally understand. (And I may end up doing the same!) I want everyone to take special care of themselves over these next few days and know you are not alone, even if it might feel like you are.
However, I want to talk about the holiday season a bit! I don’t have a ton of holiday traditions myself, but there are a few of them that mean the world to me, things I’ve cultivated over the past few years to make this season as meaningful as it can be. Let’s take a look!
1) Decorating Christmas cookies with my family.
This is always one of my favorite holiday traditions, and it’s something that my family has been doing for years and years. I have pictures of my brother and me sitting around our scuffed-up kitchen table, smiles on our faces as we hold up our horribly decorated Christmas cookies. (Please note: that the above photo is not of any cookies we’ve ever decorated… or will ever decorate.)
Nowadays, my brother, my nephews, and I come to my mom’s for cookie decorating. We cut out Christmas cookies using all of the cookie cutters my mom has collected through the years. The cookies are baked (and it never fails that at least one pan of cookies has to be thrown out because we placed them too close together and they’ve congealed into one massive cookie) and cooled, and then we get to work decorating. We’re all terrible decorators, so there’s a lot of trash-talking involved as we laugh at some of our “masterpieces.” And then, my mom sends us home with our own baggie full of cookies, which I munch on little by little throughout the next week.
We’re planning our cookie decorating day for Sunday, and I am oh-so-excited.
2) Going all out with decorating.
Oh, how I love decorating my little apartment for Christmas. I have a fake tree because I cannot deal with the setup process of a real tree anymore, but I make sure to have a fir-scented candle going as often as possible to get a semblance of the Christmas tree scent in my home. I have colored lights and white lights, garland, a tree full of ornaments, Christmas knick-knacks, a countdown snowman, and even a tiny tree that I bought from Trader Joe’s at the end of November. My home is usually pretty minimalist in terms of decor eleven months out of the year, but come the holiday season, I go all out.
I even decorate my desk at work! I have more lights, more garland, and more Christmas knick-knacks to make my desk as festive as possible for the holiday season. (One year, I put up Christmas gel clings on the glass partition between my cubicle and the person next to me, but the residue took forever to remove, ha, so I haven’t done that again.)
I just love decorating for Christmas because reading by the light of my Christmas tree or seeing my home so cozy makes me so damn happy. (Although, I’m usually equally happy to take everything down and restore my home to order by the end of December.)
3) Celebrating on Christmas Day.
I’m always so intrigued about how people celebrate the actual holiday, as I know a number of families celebrate on Christmas Eve. We’ve never been a Christmas Eve-celebrating family. For a while, my extended family got together on Christmas Eve night to exchange small gifts and just be together. In fact, I think the last Christmas my grandma was alive, we all got together on Christmas Eve and that’s a memory I cherish so much. We watched a Carrie Underwood performance together and I told her about a new guy I was seeing. It was really special. But that was the last time we did one of those gatherings. Now, I usually go out to dinner with my mom and stepdad.
Instead, we celebrate on Christmas Day. This year, my mom is hosting a small gathering at her place for my brother, his family, and me. We’ll eat ham and turkey, open presents, and just hang out. We usually meet later in the afternoon, although I usually head to my mom’s a bit earlier just to spend a little extra time with her and my stepdad. It’s Christmas, after all. Who wants to spend it alone?
4) Annual Secret Santa gift exchange.
For the past few years, my girlfriends and I have done a Secret Santa gift exchange. We go to a delicious fondue restaurant, get all dressed up, and exchange gifts. It’s honestly something I look forward to every year. I love how personal we can get with the gifts because we’re only buying for one person and we can focus all of our energy on finding the perfect gifts for her. We also use this dinner to talk about all the fun times we’ve had throughout the year and plan events for the new year. Some of the things we want to do in 2019: take a girls’ trip to Boston, go to a hibachi restaurant, volunteer, have some game nights, and go shuffleboarding.
5) Watching my favorite Christmas movies.
We all have our favorite Christmas movies, don’t we? Every year, I try to watch my standards which include The Santa Clause, Elf, Love Actually, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. I also try to throw in a “classic” Christmas movie I’ve never seen. I’ve still yet to watch A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Miracle on 34th Street! I need to watch one of those this year. But I just love watching a Christmas movie while wrapping presents or baking cookies. It’s something that fills me with so much joy and happiness!
What are some of your current Christmas traditions?
I have never watched those movies either! I definitely lean towards the more “modern” ones, like Die Hard, haha!
That being said, Kyle and I have the tradition of watching Die Hard together right before Christmas. The girls have a parade of movies they like to watch too, like Home Alone, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Muppet Family Christmas, and the Santa Clause.
I also look forward to my mom group’s annual holiday gift exchange. I started it in 2015 to honour our baby’s first Christmases (all of our babies were due in June 2015), and it’s been a fun exchange over the past four years!
We usually try and do a Christmas tree hunt for a real tree, but we’re always scrambling to find the time to do it, so next year I think we’re going to invest in a fake tree. Plus, untangling the lights and fixing the burnt-out bulbs is getting ollllld.
Mike & I watch “Home Alone” while we decorate the tree, & his aunt makes an apricot-fennel glazed ham every year for Christmas dinner. This will be our first year hosting, so Mike is going to try to make it himself. FINGERS CROSSED!
I love your traditions! We have a fake tree but I love the real tree smell so I bought these scentsicles to place in the tree and OMG they smell amazing. And I usually have the Yankee Candle Christmas Wreath candle going!
We don’t have a ton of Christmas Day traditions, but in setting up the tree and decorating we put on the Charlie Brown’s Christmas soundtrack as we work, and we also have certain ornaments that Sadie puts up, Dave puts up and myself – and Dave lifts Sadie to put the star on top of our tree.
The newest thing I’ve been doing is saving one of our Christmas cards from each year and I bought a bunch of frames to put them in so we can see them all each holiday season. And I save all the photo cards we get and put them in a little wooden crate so we can see how everyone has changed from year to year. <3
I love reading about others holiday traditions as they are so different from family to family. And I totally get why some people need to disconnect from social media around the holidays. Everyone is showing their highlight reel and it can feel like everyone is having this perfect holiday but that’s probably not exactly what is happening. And this is a time of year when you can feel more lonely when you are single – I remember that from my single days. This was a weird Christmas for us since Paul and I were both sick. We didn’t take any family photos in matching pjs like so many people on IG were! I don’t know that we’ll ever be the matching pj family, though. Maybe just me and Paul will have matching pjs? Phil is so not into that sort of thing.
My favorite part of Christmas is my family’s Christmas Eve celebration. We have snacks in the afternoon, go to church at 4 usually and then have a really delicious dinner. Then we watch this video we made in 1987. All of us grandkid reenacted the Christmas Story. My aunt and uncle lived on a farm so we did the manger scene in the barn so it looks pretty authentic. It’s fun to watch each year before we open presents. I was almost 7 and played the part of the angel Gabriel.
These are great traditions! This year we spent Christmas Eve with my family so the 24th was our “Christmas Day” we had breakfast together, opened presents, hung out all day watching movies and playing games and then had a big turkey dinner. It was great and it really did feel like Christmas! We spent actual Christmas Day with Eric’s family, but since I obviously grew up with my own family, Christmas Eve felt way more like real Christmas to me this year.
I love hearing how people celebrate Christmas too! I have friends who always celebrated and opened presents on Christmas Eve. Oh! And friends who only got gifts from Santa instead of Santa and parents. So interesting 🙂
LOL @ your comment about your cookie decorating skills. That is about where mine are, but I have fun memories of making them with family, too.
We usually always watch White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street, but missed both this year! We kind of forgot to get too Christmasy, which is okay, actually 🙂
Love this list of Christmas traditions… mine would look very similar 🙂