Holiday Traditions

December is the time of holiday traditions.  Now that the kids are a little bit older, I am hoping to add in some new traditions. This year sorta got past me. It seemed like such a short holiday season. Anyway, I kicked it off with Black Friday shopping. I go every year. I like to shop from 4-8am. There are not a lot of people out and about so it is nice and quiet, except Toys R Us. This year they had a 5am door buster sale, so it was busier than I expected, but not too bad. While I was out shopping, I bought Gingerbread Houses to build. As soon as I brought it inside, Ava asked every hour when we were going to make them. So we ended up doing it that weekend.


Then as soon as it was built, they asked hourly when they could eat it! LOL! After a day, I put the timer on and said "Go" and they went at it.

We did that for a few days and then we threw it out.

We bought our Christmas Tree the weekend of Thanksgiving also and they were both so excited to decorate. Ava did awesome decorating the tree.


It wouldn't be Christmas without the Santa's Beard Tradition. It is our version of the advent calendar.

The saying goes: "Santa's beard is very bare, on his chin there is no hair, so each day add a puff of white, when they are all on, he'll come that night". I found it on Pinterest and printed and laminated it to use each year.

It wouldn't be Christmas without Freddy, our elf on the shelf. He always arrives the evening before Dec 1st. He arrives at the door and the kids open the box and we read the story. They love to find him in the morning. Usually Ava would tell Freddy where to hide, so it made it easy. Ha!Ha!
One day, Freddy ended up in our wine fridge.


We also spent a day making some sugar cookies to decorate for Santa. Since we didn't have any of the usually decorations, we used the Easter colors. Ha. They mostly wanted to eat the batter and lick the frosting.


We also drove around and looked at Christmas lights, but not as much as I would have like too. But at least we did it!

Hoping to add in some new traditions next year.