Our Favorite Family Christmas Traditions!

Hi!! Happy Tuesday!!

 I am linking up with Amy, Jess and Alisha today and sharing some "Bits of Cheer!"

 Today, I thought I would talk a little bit about the Christmas traditions we do with our kids!

 This is my current view as I write this post...I spent all day yesterday getting up our Christmas decorations and finished our tree around 10:30 pm.  Needless to say, I pretty much crawled into bed...but the effort was so worth it as I look at our pretty tree this morning while I sip on my coffee!! What I did not include in this picture is my precious little Celine- who was up all night because she didn't feel well.  Around 4 am...she started throwing up :(  So, currently, she is snuggled up on the love seat watching a show and I am chugging sipping my coffee :)

I don't know about you, but when I first started having kids, I got pretty overwhelmed with all the amazing, fun, festive holiday traditions that I could start doing with my kids. Well, luckily, I learned very quickly that for our family, quality is SO much more important than quantity when it comes to traditions we do with our kids.  We do a FEW special things during the month of December and that allows us to enjoy what we are doing and not feel totally crazed by Christmas morning!

One of the girls' favorite Christmas traditions is our Advent calendar.  My sister-in-law gifted us this beautiful calendar (and monogrammed it for us!!) a couple years ago and the girls just LOVE when I put it up!! It is made out of fabric and the "ornaments"  velcro onto the tree. It is so cute and very kid-friendly!!  Unfortunately, I can't find it available anywhere! I know she got it on One Step Ahead- but they do not carry it anymore :(

I will keep my eye out for it and if it becomes available- I will let you all know!

This is a fabric Advent calendar I found on Amazon (check it out here) and it looks very similar to the one we have! It has amazing ratings and is just under $35.  If you have a Prime account- you could have it to your house by Friday!! :)

 As an alternative option to the fabric calendar we have, I love this calendar by Melissa and Doug !  You can find it here! This cute calendar has 5 star ratings and is under $20!!

Another Christmas tradition, is reading from this precious book, Countdown to Christmas.

It is the sweetest book and every day there is a story, a reflection and a little discussion or activity to have/do as a family- all pointing to the REAL reason for Christmas- the birth of Jesus Christ.  Now that my oldest daughter can read, I plan to have her do the daily reading at breakfast time after we put our ornament on our Advent Calendar!

As a Catholic family, we celebrate Advent in our house and one way we do this is by having an Advent Wreath.  Aaron made our Advent Wreath from a log from the backyard of our old house in Cleveland- and I just love that it!  Every year we get 3 new purple candles and 1 pink candle to celebrate the 4 weeks of Advent, leading up to Christmas.  The girls have all brought home special prayers to say during Advent and I have compiled them all together and we are saying a different one each night at dinner as we light our Advent candles!

I saw this Advent Wreath craft idea from the blog, Sweet Little Ones and I just love it! If I can get my act together, I am going to gather up the supplies for each of the girls to make one this upcoming weekend. I know for my girls, they are happiest when they are being creative- and it allows us to have some great discussions about what Advent means to us as they each make their own wreath!

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A super fun, EASY tradition we started doing with the kids last year is taking them in their Christmas jammies, while blasting Christmas music, to a local drive-thru Christmas lights display.  This, obviously, is NOT an original idea- but it is SO fun! We are so lucky to have an awesome, FREE lights display about 5 minutes from our house- so it is just super fun and stress free!

And finally, because I feel like one of our personal missions as parents, is to instill a mindset of "IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU" in our children- I planned out 3 Advent activities that we do once a week during the month of December that is in some way serving other people.

Here is what we are doing this year!

First weekend of December: Pick out Christmas presents from the Samaritan's Purse Christmas catalog and make a family donation to Food for the Poor.  We are going to talk about how just giving $45 (which is how much it is for our family to go out to eat for ONE MEAL) would feed a child for a WHOLE year.

Second weekend of December:  Volunteer as a family at Holy Family Shelter in the Children's Room. We will bring some coloring pages and Christmas cookies to share with all of our new friends!

Third weekend of December: Bake Christmas cookies and deliver them to our neighbors!

I think what is SO important to remember during the Holiday season, no matter how you and your family choose to celebrate...is to do your best to find a balance of peacefulness, service to others and just plain wild and crazy fun.  It is so easy to get sucked into GETTING AND DOING EVERYTHING! It might take a few years, but find some traditions that work for YOUR family. 

That's ALL that matters :)

Hope you have the BEST FIRST day of December!!