Christmas Traditions | Celebrating Christmas

When it comes to Christmas, everyone has their own way of celebrating. My family and I are no different. We love to celebrate Christmas in our own way - but we have continued some family traditions as well as picking up some new ones over the years.

Fill it Yourself Advent Calendars

Advent calendars are not an unusual tradition to have - most people will do some form of countdown from the first of December to Christmas Eve.

As you may have read in my 'A Handmade Christmas' post; we have some awesome quilted fill-it-yourself advent calendars made by my talented mother-in-law.

These are hanging in our home from the first of December, and usually don't get taken down until all the decorations are removed at the end of the month. This is mainly because they look awesome as decorations, so there is no need to remove them just because all of the pockets are empty!

Elf on A Shelf

This month I was meant to be taking part in a similar event to the #Blogtober16 and #AlphaBlogBites daily blogging events that I took part in. It's all about 24 days of fun with your Elf on a Shelf, and is being run by the lovely (and local to me!) blogger behind The Mum Diaries. I decided to simply stick to having it on social media - so that it didn't matter if I was giving birth on one of the days, and a post didn't make it to being published.

Just because I decided not to do a daily blog post on our elf, doesn't mean she's not about the house being cheeky! Check out my Facebook, Instagram or Twitter feeds to see the latest of Belle's antics.

I decide I wanted to go all out this year with our EOAS. We have now got a selection of accessories to go with her and I love them.

Our gorgeous door was hand crafted by Claytastic Cake Toppers, which is not only a small, local business (I love to buy from and to support small business owners - mainly because I am one!) but it also is run by an awesome fellow mummy blogger, who writes over at Mummy and Moose.

Visiting Santa

This was not a tradition that we had prior to having our daughter. However it has become a new part of our lives now that we have R and are soon to have Little L too.

For the last few years as we have been living in Peterborough, we have had plenty of options of where we can visit Santa - but we decided thanks to a recommendation from a friend, that the best place to go is Baytree Garden Centre's Winter Wonderland, in Spalding.

R has never been too impressed with the big man in red - but we still go anyway as the experience is fun for us, even if she doesn't want to be near Santa himself!

Christmas Eve Box

This will be a new one for us this year. After reading a post that was shared from Every Child is A Blessing about their Christmas traditions heading into their son's first Christmas - which included this box idea - I decided that we should do this too.

This Christmas we will be celebrating not just Christmas, but also our newest addition, with Little L being due exactly one week before Christmas on the 18th of December. Not only this, but R will be a couple of months shy of her third birthday; which means that she has a greater understanding and thus excitement about the whole concept of Christmas.

These two things combined have definitely affected my choices when putting the Christmas Eve box together. We have an amazing selection of items in our Christmas eve box this year, and I can't wait to see the look on R's face when we open it up. You can find the full post on Our Christmas Eve Box on my blog next week.

Christmas Stockings

Like most people, we have a Christmas stocking (or two - depending on what we put inside!) every year. This is what we decided would be the gift from Santa, and so every year he fills one up for each of us.

This year we have made sure that there is one for Little L too - as despite her being so small, we still want R to know that all is fair at Christmas!

Christmas Fairy

Some people like to sit down first thing in the morning and open their gifts from start to finish on Christmas day, but we do things a little differently in our home.

A tradition that started in my husband's childhood home is the idea of spreading all of the gifts out throughout the day; and they are given to each member of the family by the 'Christmas Fairy' - which was always one of the children that were in the house on the day.

This year, as with last year, R will be our fairy. Although I had to settle for an angel dress this time, as the fairy had sold out in her size! I'm sure that as Little L gets older they will share the duties - but for now we will enjoy R handing out gifts to everyone that we see on Christmas day.

I'm sure there are other things that we do that I am forgetting with the full onset of baby brain happening at the moment, but these are certainly a few of my favourite things to do at Christmas.

Do you have any Christmas traditions that you do - or anything that you have discovered and are doing for the first time this year?

For more posts about Christmas, visit the Christmas category page. If you have any questions about our Christmas traditions which I have not covered in this post, feel free to ask in the comments section below.