Each year since Max and I have been married, we have celebrated Twelve Days of Christmas. When it was just the two of us, Twelve Days included both gifts and activities but as children entered in and our budget has changed, we now do 12 days of Christmas activities. Each year prior to this year, we have done the 12 days leading up to and including Christmas but this year, we are going to do Twelve Days spread out a bit and hope that we feel less rushed. Some days are more involved than others and things and plans change every year. This is just a guide for us to make sure we intentionally do the things we want to do. Spreading it out a bit will hopefully helps us not feel so crunched.
So here is our plan in no particular order(we are giving ourselves flexibility this year :)):
Hanukkah Night: We’ve decided that it would be fun to celebrate Hanukkah one night to share with our kids about the tradition in the Old Testament. We do this by making a traditional Hankkah Dinner and dessert. We plan dradle and talk about why the Jewish people celebrate this holiday.
Santa Pancake: Breakfast for dinner…True story of St. Nick
Go see Christmas Lights and get Kettle Corn(The neighborhood we go to see lights at has a house that sells kettle corn, which is my favorite!!)
Mickey Mouse Gingerbread Cookie decorating night. Disneyland and Disney World sell a great gingerbread cookie mix at Christmas time. We don’t have passes this year but we have friends who do and they picked some up for us!
Make paper snowflakes and have a snowball fight. We did this last year with jumbo marshmallows and it was sooooooo much fun! This year, we found some light up stuffed snowballs so we are going to try and do our fight with those in the “dark” (we have dimmable lights so we will use those.)
Bethlehem Story: There is a local church who does an interactive walkthrough of the streets of Bethlehem. My in-laws took Aston last year and it made a big impression on him so we are all going to go this year. I’m super excited about it!!
Christmas Eve Night: we go to the Christmas Eve service at our church and then come home and wait for daddy. When daddy comes home (he works at our church so he has to get set up for the next services) he brings with him a special present: The Christmas Eve Box. It has new christmas PJ’s, movie and popcorn. We started this tradition last year and it was a lot of fun. It was also a nice calm way to get ready for bed and for the next morning.
Possibly another church outreach in the area that has snow. In SoCal, you go looking for places with snow 🙂 If we don’t do this, we will do a movie night.
We love this tradition and enjoy it so much more then trying to do something every day for the month of December. It’s a busy month for us as it is for most so this is something fun we look forward to each year!
What are some of your favorite Christmas Activities?
You can see what we’ve done in pervious years here.
