Christmas Traditions

Our town has so many Christmas events, it's hard to keep track!  We have a few traditions we inherited from each of our childhoods, and we added a few more this year.  The first weekend in December is always the biggest.  The tree lighting ceremony was a favorite, where we roasted marshmallows, made s'mores (Xavier only ate the chocolate), and took a horse-drawn carriage ride through a gorgeous part of our neighborhood.

Our town's most popular event, "Christmas in the Park", lets kids visit a Santa who knows every small detail about the kid, including best friends, favorite Christmas song, etc.  Xavier had a personalized visit with Santa and it was the greatest thing!  When he gets older, he'll enjoy it even more, and may even be shocked that Santa knows his Elf's name and Christmas traditions than only we know about.  After the visit, we took a warm bus ride (weather was too cold for the horse-drawn carriage ride through the park, fine by me!!) to the shelter house where Xavier played corn hole and made ornaments.

I feel like it's my job to make holidays as memorable as possible.  And not with presents or over the the top Pinterest projects, but to make every day things more exciting.  I can still remember making cutout sugar cookies every Christmas when I was a kid.  There's something great about having messy, flour covered counter tops, with Christmas music playing in the background.  I'm so impressed by Xavier's cookie making skills, so much improvement from last year!

We are spending lots of time in the snow, building a snowman (and throwing snowballs at and destroying with bats) and forts.  I'm already looking forward to the next snowfall.  I'm excited to make our traditional "snow cream", where the main ingredient is freshly, fallen snow.

Look at the determination!

Batting practice.

We are also planning to do "Elf Yourself", make reindeer food, and surprising Xavier with a day of ice skating (assuming he can stand up in the skates!) and hot chocolate.  I say it all the time, but seeing the holidays through the eyes of your kids is the most magical thing in the world!  It's so easy to incorporate these easy things into the day to make each day just a little more fun.


So make pancakes.  Make magic.  Make memories.