EP 21: Favorite Family Christmas Traditions

This week on the podcast, by special request, we are discussing favorite family Christmas traditions: Why they’re important. What counts as a family tradition. How to establish a few new traditions. And what to do if an old tradition no longer serves you well.

That’s because I got the following special request from a listener this week. She writes:

Well, I thought that was a great idea, so I’m sharing an outline of my response to this listener below today’s show notes.

Before I delve into all our family’s favorite Christmas traditions, I want to clarify Celestia’s compliment a bit. In addition to my podcast, she mentioned my emails and website (linked above).

The emails Celestia is talking about is a weekly newsletter I send out every Wednesday morning called Flanders Family Freebies. It is simply a list of links to free resources we offer through our blogs, all centered around a theme.

• Last week’s list was full of various Advent Calendars, which I’ll tell you more about here in a minute.
• A couple of weeks before that, I sent free resources for celebrating Thanksgiving: pennant banners, conversation starters, games, coloring pages, Thanksgiving hymn booklets, etc.
• A week before that, it was resources for celebrating Veteran’s Day. So if you enjoy that sort of thing, be sure to subscribe through the link in today’s shownotes.

Then I’m assuming the website Celestia mentioned is our family website, Flanders Family Homelife. It’s especially popular this time of year because we offer so many free Christmas resources: party games, coloring pages, paper crafts, bucket lists, planning charts, calendars, discussion prompts, and much, much more.

That’s a different website than the marriage blog you’re currently reading, Loving Life at Home, which shares the same name as my podcast. But now, on to Christmas traditions….

Our Favorite Family Christmas Traditions

Christmas traditions are valuable because they bond families (and communities) together and foster a sense of belonging, stability, and continuity.

They create memories and give us all something to look forward to. They offer us an opportunity to remember and celebrate God’s blessings – which for us, at Christmas time, center on the Lord Jesus Christ’s taking on flesh and being born as a man.

And they teach history and reinforce important character traits – like generosity and gratitude and love and joy and patience and peace and a sense of wonder.

Some of our family traditions, we do the exact same way every single year and someone would probably protest if we tried to change anything. Others traditions fluctuate and morph according to the ages and interests of our children. And that’s okay, too.

It only takes doing something two or three times for it to become a tradition. Chances are, you already have several family traditions yourself, whether you recognize that fact or not.

I’ll group our family’s favorite traditions in broad categories to help you recognize traditions you already have in place or choose some you’d like to adopt.

Advent Calendars

These are just fun ways to help your children count down the days until Christmas. Have you ever noticed how, as a child, it felt like Christmas took forever to arrive, but as an adult, the time flies by? You blink your eyes, and it’s Christmas morning.

Over on our family website, we offer lots of free resources for creating your own advent calendars, including.

Books

We re-read many of the same holiday stories every year, including a variety of Christmas picture books, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Barbara Robinson’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, the story of our own family history in Glad Tidings, and Luke 2 on Christmas morning before opening our gifts.

I also have a Christmas devotional called Joy the the World I pull out every December to re-read and work through a few more pages. It has word studies, writing prompts, related Bible verses on nearly every page, and some of the most beautiful vintage artwork to color that you will ever see.

Decorations

Lots of our decorations are homemade: ornaments on the tree, stockings on the mantle ( although ours are way too numerous to fit there any more, pennant banners and paper snowflakes and wreaths for the door.

My mother made sequined felt stockings for me and my sister when we were little, and I’ve continued that tradition myself. In our current house, I hang them all on an empty, 14-foot long curtain rod that hangs over a huge picture window in our den.

Some of the Nativity sets we set up are made with painted wooden pegs and felt scraps. Others were gifts. Others we bought after Christmas when stores used to sell holiday merchandize for 90% off the day after Christmas.

But we normally also put up several trees – including a couple of smaller ones I bought at garage sales for as little as 25-cents a piece. Twelve kids + twenty grandkids + multiple handmade ornaments every year equals way to many to fit on just one tree, so we group them according to color or theme: brightly colored ornaments go on the den tree… fancy, gilded ornaments on the old fashioned tree… blue and white ornaments on the tree in the dining room… etc. You get the idea.

We also have a Christmas village that my mother bought me at a garage sale for $1 a piece that I set up on the buffet in our entry way. It is beautiful.

Movies

Rewatch the same handful of movies every year, including It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Elf, Miracle on 34^th Street (the old one), and While You Were Sleeping.

I’ve even created trivia quizzes for many of them, which you’ll find linked in today’s show notes.

Cards & Letters

Sending and receiving Christmas cards is definitely one of my favorite things to do in the month of December, and our family has a lot of traditions surrounding the Christmas letters we send to family and friends each year.

We have so many, in fact, that I plan to dedicate an entire podcast to that topic, hopefully next week. So we will talk more about it then.

Acts of Service:

Serving together as a family is a great way to keep the spirit of Christmas alive and thriving, whether you are stuffing shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child, buying gifts for Angel Tree, stocking food pantries, ringing the bell for Salvation Army, or playing instruments or singing carols at a local senior living home.

An example would be shoebox stuffing. A lot of times we will host a packing party and have friends over, and they’ll all bring multiple copies of the same item to go into shoeboxes, and we’ll just pull all of our resources and pack a bunch of shoeboxes together. And then once they were packed, we would gather around the boxes and pray over them before we sent them out. And then we’d share a simple meal together, usually just rice and beans, since those were the staple foods in many of the countries where the boxes were headed. And then other acts of service would include things like Angel Tree or working at food pantries. Several of our kids have volunteered at food pantries over the years or ringing bells for Salvation Army. That’s something that we commonly did as a family when our kids were growing up. Or playing the piano and singing carols for the residents at nursing homes. Or Christmas caroling in general. A lot of times we will carol around our neighborhood. Sometimes we, on cold nights, will bring thermoses of hot cocoa and pass those out to the neighbors or candy canes with the gospel message on a little tag. I have a free printable for that on my website. The point is building family traditions around acts of service is a great way to keep the spirit of Christmas alive in your home.

Special Events:

Then the seventh category would be special events. These would include things like the candlelight service that we normally attend on Christmas Eve at our church. Or even if we’re out of town, we’ll find a church nearby that has a candlelight service. And then Christmas concerts. Our homeschool group hosts a Christmas concert every year right before Thanksgiving that we’ve always enjoyed. And we’ve continued to go to that even after my kids graduated and are no longer singing in that choir. We missed it this year because we were out of town that weekend, but we plan to keep going in the future. Another thing we traditionally do is our city opens up several of the downtown museums for free one night in early December every year. And we try to attend that. We go to the Goodman Museum and the Discovery Science Place and the Railroad Museum and a couple of others. Neighboring cities have several similar events, Christmas parades, outdoor movies, home shows, like I mentioned last week in my podcast, holiday markets. We’ll a lot of times attend some of those. There was a church in Jacksonville, just south of us, that used to host a walk through nativity when my children were younger that was just awesome. They don’t do it anymore. But every year that they did, we would drive out to Jacksonville and go through this walk through nativity. Other churches in our area sponsor drive through nativities, and we try to make the rounds through those as well when we’re in town.

Then when we first moved to Tyler, we would participate in the Jingle Bell Run that they would have every December, first part of December. There was a 5K and a one mile fun run that you could enter for the price of a canned food donation to the local soup kitchen. And so we would do that with all of our kids. And we’d probably have kept on doing this, too, except that the event ended up conflicting with another event that we traditionally went to. And so the 5K lost out.

Places to Go:

Then closely related to special events is places to go. And when I think of this, I think first and foremost of my grandparents’ house. My family traditionally celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve morning, and then we would drive to Oklahoma every year to spend Christmas Eve evening and Christmas Day with my father’s parents. There are such great memories that I have associated with spending time at their house. Then driving around local neighborhoods, looking at lights is something else that we like to do. Lots of families do that. We usually try to drive up to Dallas. My mom still lives near Dallas, and we’ll go to the Arboretum, the Dallas Arboretum, at some point during the Christmas season. They have a wonderful collection of huge lighted gazebos on display for most of the month of December or all of the month of December. I think they put them up even before Thanksgiving. And they have one for each of the 12 days of Christmas. The mechanical all lit up is really impressive. Then they also have a wonderful Christmas village full of Victorian era carolers and just wonderful memories there. So we try to do that each year, too. Then for the past five years, our families gathered in San Antonio for a week before Christmas. And there’s a long list of activities that we do in San Antonio every year. I’ll probably eventually do a podcast devoted to that here in a couple of weeks since we’re about tohead that way again.

Holiday Foods:

Then the ninth category, Christmas traditions centers on food. I have two great memories associated with food from my own childhood, part of which I’ve tried to carry on and do with my own children. One is that my mother would always fix a huge Christmas breakfast. That’s mainly because we were always traveling on Christmas Eve day, and our traditional Christmas meal growing up would be that breakfast that we ate Christmas Eve morning after opening gifts, which was our Christmas at home before we spent Christmas Day with my dad’s family. But she would always make a huge egg breakfast casserole with ham and cheese, really delicious, and a fruit salad and biscuits. For my family, I usually make blueberry oat muffins instead of the biscuits. I’ll link the recipe to that in today’s show notes as well. But I love having a big Christmas breakfast together as soon as the gifts are open.

And then the other thing from my childhood is that my mom and dad would do a lot of baking each December, making things that they only made one time of year, like a fantasy fudge, which was always my favorite. That was the fudge that was made with marshmallow cream. It’s so creamy and they put pecans in it. So delicious. Then they’d make:

• Sausage balls
• A cheese log
• A pecan roll
• Some ranger cookies (that was my sister’s favorite)
• Cathedral window cookies (that were colored marshmallows coated in chocolate with nuts)
• Homemade Chex Mix (that was before it was available in packages and it tasted so much better than what the packaged stuff is)
• Martha Washington balls (those were coconut balls dipped in dark chocolate)
• Bite-sized pumpkin pies
• Vegetable pizza
• Peanut brittle

More than a dozen recipes in all they’d make every year. And it was delicious. And they would do some entertaining and so they’d serve it at parties as well. But a lot of it was eaten just by our family, which I only had one sister. So that was a lot of sugar and too much probably to continue that tradition in my own family, especially with four diabetics in my family now. But I do make the sausage balls and the veggie pizza I’ve made for my family many, many times. And I usually do whip up one batch of that fantasy fudge each year. But I’m thinking about adding those cheese rolls this year because I know a couple of my boys that are still at home would absolutely love that. They love cheese and crackers. So whether it’s turkey and dressing or Christmas ham or homemade tamales, you’ve got to eat anyway. So picking a favorite family recipe or two is an easy way to add new traditions to your Christmas agenda.

Christmas Music:

Then the 10th category is music. Now, I love Christmas music. Like I mentioned last week in the podcast, I will crank it up and sing it all year long. But I had a favorite CD of traditional carols, all the carols I grew up singing in church that I kept in my car year round again. But my husband forgot to pull it out of the CD player one time when he traded in that car several years ago. So that one’s lost. And I’ve been playing my second favorite CD ever since, which is Bing Crosby. It’s about half traditional church carols and half secular songs like Jingle Bells and Silver Bells and Mele Kalikimaka and things like that. But it’s a lot of fun. I love the swing rhythm and the harmony is really wonderful. Then school concerts, church concerts, Christmas caroling ourselves, as I’ve already mentioned. Sometimes we do those things multiple times. When my daughter Bethany was in college, she brought home a friend from Switzerland to spend the holidays with us one year. And I think our family caroled about seven times while she was with us, which was a lot even for us. But just fell out that way that particular year. And I’m sure that friend probably thought that all we knew how to do was sing Christmas carols for fun. But that’s how it went down that year.

Holiday Games:

And then the 11th category is fun and games. I think that play is so important to a family and making those wonderful memories together and bonding with your children and spouse is a great way to go about it. And when you have as many kids as we do, everything turns into a competition. In addition to the aforementioned movie trivia games, we also play general Christmas trivia games and Christmas word games and I spy games and musical games and a slew of others. I offered dozens of these on our family website as free printable downloads. And again, I’ll put a link in the show notes today. Another thing that we like doing is jigsaw puzzles. I have so many fond memories from childhood of my parents sitting up late with all the aunts and uncles piecing together jigsaw puzzles in the kitchen at my me mom and papa’s house while all the kids were bedded down in the next room in sleeping bags on the floor of the den. And it was such a safe and happy feeling laying there in bed and listening or laying there in my sleeping bag and listening to all that laughter andchatter drifting in from the next room as they all joked and worked and concentrated and ribbed one another. That’s probably why I still love working jigsaw puzzles. And worked and concentrated and ribbed one another. That’s probably why I still love working jigsaw puzzles today. Given my family history, it seems like the adult thing to do. The kids went to bed early, the adults stayed up and worked on the jigsaw puzzles. And fortunately, a few of my own children love working puzzles as much or more than I do, which has helped keep that particular tradition alive for a couple more generations. This year, I even bought a puzzle a day advent calendar for my daughter, my youngest, who is a big puzzle hound. And so we’ve been working on that already this year.

Then most of those aunts and uncles that were working on those original Christmas puzzles drove to Sulphur, Oklahoma from Texas. But my Aunt Gwen, who was second born just after my dad, who was the oldest, still lived in the same town as my grandparents. So she and her family would always go home to sleep on Christmas Eve and come back on Christmas morning. Once it got too late, they’d just go home. And sometimes they’d have to leave before the puzzle was quite finished. But every time when they did, never fail, my Uncle Ray would sneak one piece of that puzzle back home in his pocket so that he could be the one to put the final piece in at breakfast the next morning, which was really an irritating but simultaneously hilarious thing to do. And it became a Christmas tradition unto itself.

So whether you like board games or physical games or thinking games or goofball games or competitive games, I’d encourage you to find some way to play together as a family this Christmas. Laughter is a great medicine and play usually provides generous doses of it.

Family Traditions and Challenges:

Something that has become a new Christmas tradition in our family has been family challenges that my son Samuel and his wife Becca sponsor every year. These are often elaborate contests with amazing prizes that they announce months ahead of time to allow family members plenty of time to prepare for it. And I think their first year the challenge was financial fitness. Everybody was encouraged to read a book on some money issue and then submit a written report summarizing the key takeaways. Then the entire family voted on the best report using a grading rubric that my son designed and the winner got a generous cash prize.

Another year the challenge was physical fitness and we all got points for how often we exercised with bonus points awarded for maintaining an unbroken streak of three times per week, 20 minutes per exercise session. And then last year it was a geography challenge. Each person studied a different country and then we presented PowerPoint presentations on it to the entire group. There was a time limit, I think maybe five minutes, I can’t remember, and some of us went all out. We dressed in the native garb of the country we were studying or presenting on. We served traditional foods, sang folk songs from that country, shared treats from the country that we studied. It was very educational for everyone and for the record though my thoroughly researched and very well written financial essay finished dead last that year, last year my PowerPoint on Poland won the grand prize which was a very generous donation made in my honor to the charity of my choice which I think is an awesome prize.

Then this Christmas Samuel and Bekah are sponsoring a Bible memory challenge which I’ve been preparing for all year long and I will link my best memory techniques in today’s show notes as well if I can remember to do that.

Christmas Gifts:

Then the last category is gifts. Obviously gifts are a big part of Christmas. Jesus is God’s gift to us and he set the example for us and so we give gifts to one another. I hear from a lot of people that just assume our Christmas must be over the top with so many people in our family and so many children to buy for but I will have to be honest with you we have really downplayed the gift giving aspect of Christmas in our family. We have limited our gifts to what fits in a stocking. Every child gets a stocking like I’ve already talked about. They all have a handmade stocking by me and I fill it on Christmas morning and then we normally put one family gift under the tree. All growing up they would have one gift under the tree that the family shared. It would be maybe a book that we would read together as a family or one year it was a slack line that they were all challenged to you know the first one that learned how to walk all the way across the slack line from one tree to the other was promised $10 as a prize or it may be a family game or some art supplies or something of that nature. So a family gift under the tree plus stockings for most of their growing up years was their Christmas in addition to what they would get from grandparents which I really encourage grandparents to give consumable gifts like art supplies and that kind ofthing so that we didn’t just live in a house that were up to our eyeballs with toys especially since the classic toys, the building toys, the balls and baby dolls. Classic toys, the building toys, the balls and baby dolls really last for the most part. You know, if you have Lincoln Logs, they’re going to last through all 12 kids. You don’t have to keep getting a new set of Lincoln Logs or a new set of Duplos or a new wooden train for every child. You just keep playing with the first set for the rest of your parenting experience.

So we didn’t really need a lot like that. But as our kids started getting older, they wanted to experience gift giving as well. And so the older ones came up with the idea of drawing Secret Santa names. So we draw names for the children and they will buy one gift for one sibling. And so each person has one gift under the tree in addition to the family gift now.

For many years before we did Secret Santa, the extra gifts under the tree were the books that I wrapped up and that we would unwrap one a day and read together.

So Christmas traditions, it’s never too late to start a new tradition. If you hear something you like that appeals to you and you think your family would enjoy it, then just start now. And it’s also never too late to quit a tradition. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done it 10 years in a row, if it no longer serves your family or is no longer meaningful, it is okay to drop it. Don’t feel like you have to keep doing something just because you’ve always done it that way.

For years and years I took my children to see the Nutcracker every year. And I loved the music and enjoyed the ballet, but we reached a point when my son said, please don’t make us sit through the Nutcracker anymore. And so we dropped it.

Spending Time Together:

The important thing is that you’re spending time together as a family doing things you all enjoy that strengthen your family bonds and draw you closer together. And if that means doing the same things every year the same way, then that’s great. Go for it. If it means doing something totally new every single year as a family and experiencing a new adventure together, that’s fine too. Every family is different.

And the important thing is to spend time together and create memories together that will draw you closer to one another and hopefully closer to the Lord as we focus at Christmas time on the birth of Jesus and the reason God sent him to earth in the first place, which was to die for our sins because of his great love for us. Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift.

I pray that you will have a merry and meaningful Christmas as you celebrate in your own home this year. Thanks so much for listening today.

If you have a question you’d like to hear covered on this podcast, message me on Instagram at Flanders underscore family or contact me through my website, lovinglifeathome.com.

Before you go, if you’ve been encouraged by something you’ve heard on the show, do me a favor and forward the link to a friend or head over to Loving Life at Home on Apple iTunes to subscribe and leave a written review of the show. You’re doing so will help others find me so they can listen too.

Until next time, I pray the Lord will bless your efforts to build a loving home life centered on him.