What Are Your Holiday Traditions? 🎄🎁❄️☃️

For me and my fiance, we spend a week watching Christmas movies! We watch the movies in a particular order (and watch anywhere from 1-3 movies per day), and we usually have some kind of treat (Christmas cookies, holiday themed beverages, etc) to enjoy while watching the movies as well. We've held this tradition for the last 4-5 years!

This is our first Christmas, engaged and living in our own house together so we never had traditions, but are starting them!

I first made him adopt my families tradition of getting a real tree (his family always did fake and that just aint it for me) so we went with my parents to the same tree farm we've been going to for years and he cut down his first tree!

We also started doing a "chirstmas movie a night" so every night in December we watch a different christmas movie, we start it during dinner and finish it snuggled up on the couch with popcorn! It's slowly becoming my favorite part of my day!

View Quoted Comment I love that you're being intentional about starting traditions! Awesome about going out and selecting a real tree together, too. Does your fiance Iike the real tree better than the artificial tree?


Love the Christmas movies!! My fiance and I do a week of Christmas movies and it's so fun. Great idea to start them during dinner, that sounds like such a great ending to each day!

My husband and i put up the christmas tree together and decorate around the house! ever since we started living together though we decorate even more

View Quoted Comment Awesome that you decorate together! Do you guys get a real tree every year, or do you have an artificial tree?

I make candy plates with my husband's side of the family. They make these every year, and they definitely make these goodies from scratch. And then when it's Christmas day we always get together to eat and do a white elephant gift exchange.

I do want to start making new traditions when we have kids for sure

View Quoted Comment Ooh, those sound delicious! And the white elephant gift exchange is always a fun idea. What ideas for traditions do you plan to start once you have kids?

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He likes the smell of the real tree, but thinks it looks no different than the artificial but christmas is my favorite holiday so I get free reign over what we do lol!

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I was thinking of doing elf on the shelf, but I know it requires a lot of work LOL! I've seen some moms do it for their kids and it's such a cute concept. But I guess we shall see. I was also thinking of incorporating an advent calendar and it can be filled with fun activities of what we should do that day and goodies. That way it's not just all things.

We have lived together now for 5 years, so lots of traditions together. We always get all the decorations out and set up the artificial tree (don't decorate, just set it up and plump it) after Thanksgiving dinner. We always drive around finding the best holiday light displays -- especially fun this year since we moved to a whole new state. We have our "must watch every year" fun movies (Elf, White Christmas, Polar Express and Charlie Brown Christmas) Christmas Eve is dinner out, then we watch "Silent Night" - (In a cabin in a WWII front, a German mom with a son mediates a truce between 3 German and 3 American soldiers so they can all celebrate Christmas Eve 1944)

MY fun tradition - that FH still shakes his head over - is numbering all the gifts for the kids (ok, they're 33 and 30, but still ...) Then I tell them which # gift to find and open. They are not allowed to pre-organize the pile of gifts, and may not help their sibling find a gift. They kids love it, and FH gets a huge kick out of seeing them paw through the piles to find "the one".

We decorate the house together, and listen to Christmas music on spotify while we wrap presents.

I suppose we don't have a huge number of traditions.

Our main tradition is that every year the format of the day is the same.

He and I wake up and open presents and have a small breakfast (usually sparkling non-alcoholic wine because we're driving, plus fancy butter and Christmas Tree shaped Crumpets - this year the butter is brandy butter!)

Then we do lunch at his parent's house with his whole family before driving down to see my parents and sibling/her spouse for dinner at their house, which is about another hour and a bit further on from where his parents live. We stay a few days down with my parents and have a bbq on Boxing Day (it's summer here in Australia), hang out, sometimes my fiance plays a golf course he hasn't tried so I get some time with my parents, etc.

We make our big meal together on Christmas Eve: fried fish, mushroom soup, and some kind of vegetable, before heading to church at midnight. Christmas morning we open presents and eat his mom's special Christmas coffee cake (I knew she liked me when we got engaged and she gave me the secret recipe). We started a tradition last year of Trader Joe's apps as a meal for Christmas Day (since Christmas Eve is so involved), and I think we'll stick with it.

View Quoted Comment I agree with him! I absolutely love the smell of real Christmas trees. You can tell the difference on some artificial trees, but I think there are some that look so realistic!

View Quoted Comment Lol I've certainly seen some creative (and hilarious!) Elf On The Shelf ideas. The advent calendar of activities is cute! And it's a really good way to make memories and get into the Christmas mood.

View Quoted Comment These are some fun traditions!! I especially love the idea of driving around to look at lights. There's a place near me that puts up a drive-thru holiday light show in the parking lot of a local sports arena, and it's so fun to go through!

My fiance and I also watch Christmas movies as one of our traditions - we spread them out over a week, and we stick to a specific order that we watch them in, lol. We start watching them tomorrow night!!

Fun idea to number the gifts and have them look for a certain number! I don't think it matters how old the kids are - as long as they still enjoy the tradition, that's all that matters!

2 days before Christmas, we go and get donuts and coffee at the same donut shack in Burbank. This has a long back story but the short version is we both grew up in the hood where donuts were a dietary staple xD. My grandfather (who was basically like my dad growing up and who's death has made me really dread Christmas for 20+ years) used to buy me donuts whenever I wanted as a kid and his mom used to collect bottle and cans to recycle so she could buy him and his brother donuts on the weekends. The whole thing was his idea. I told him about 4 years ago that my therapist told me we should start making our own Christmas traditions to help me cope with how depressed I get around the time. He surprised me that night, and I bawled like a baby.

A year after we started, his uncle, who was also like a father figure to him growing up, died and it hit him pretty hard. His favorite memory of him was the guy buying him and his brother hot cheetos and a gatorade every time he saw them (lavish treats they could never afford). So that year i surprised him at the donut shop with a bag of hot cheetos and a gatorade (cue crying). So that's what we do every year. Donuts, coffee, gatorade, and hot cheetos, in the cold, 2 days before Christmas.

We also go light hunting in Burbank because there are a lot of film industry people who go all out!!

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I LOVE this numbered gift idea! That sounds so fun!

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I started it when the kids got in their teens - the "magic" of Santa had long since passed, and it seemed as though the gift pile went down wayyy too fast as presents were opened. This number system made things slow down, and increased the anticipation. Let's face it, the older kids KNOW they're most likely going to get that big ticket item they wish for - I just make the suspense longer. LOLOL Moms can do that, ya know. Funny story, my son was hmmmm, 29? It was his first year stateside after working for Royal Caribbean Cruises. I had his box of gifts ready to mail out ..... and he asked me would the gifts be numbered like always? Because he wanted to zoom with us and open gifts just as if he were there. ~sigh~ As a side note, this year will be the first time in 11 years I'll have both my boys together with me for Christmas. You can bet the pile is numbered and ready for the scramble!!

View Quoted Comment That's awesome that you take some time to yourselves on Christmas morning and also that you get to spend the day with both of your families! I'm so jealous that you guys get nice weather this time of year, I know my fiance wishes he could golf around the holidays lol! What is brandy butter? It sounds fancy!

View Quoted Comment Yes, I really do feel lucky we don’t have to decide who we spend Christmas with!
And the weather is always interesting.. the last few weeks have been wild. One day it will be 15°C and torrential rain, the next day 32°C and searing sun. This weekend Australia is supposed to be the hottest place on earth, apparently!
But at least it’s not freezing, haha, I’m a reptile and get cold very easily.Normally brandy butter is butter that has had brandy whipped into it along with sugar and vanilla. The one we received looks more like… you know when you get feta in oil? Like that but with butter in brandy maple syrup lol. I have nooo idea how this will taste! Here’s a pic.