Regardless of what your family celebrates, holidays are  the perfect time to build family traditions which will stay with them for a lifetime. I love how my kids remember specific Christmas activities, books, and ornaments year to year. As you’ll see below, we have an eclectic list of traditions that ranges from religious to secular. But the first rule is: No decorations or music until the day after Thanksgiving!

• 2 trees  – 1 for my theme of white, gold, and natural wood. The other is anything goes! Except for the candy canes, which are limited to the top half of the tree so the pug doesn’t get them.
• Gingerbread house decorating – We just buy the $10 kits – and maybe some extra candy decorations. By the end of the season, my younger son’s has usually been stripped of its gumdrop roof, but he at least owns up to the theft now!
• The animated decorations – this includes a 3 foot tall singing Tigger, Yoda Santa, the Coca Cola Santa Snowglobe, and the inflatable Snoopy outside. Yes, it’s a religious holiday, but we love our characters and the joy they bring to the season as well! They used to all have assigned places that my kids remembered, but now that we’ve moved and moved the walls around in this house, everything had to find a new home this year.
• One present to open on Christmas Eve. It is ALWAYS Christmas pajamas.
• Making fudge and sugar cookies
• Advent candles
• Advent calendar – one with fabric hanging ornaments and a newer one with boxes that I try to remember to fill with candy for the day.
• A German pyramid (see above). I’d never heard of this, but my son came home from preschool one day having learned about it from his German friend. Now we have our own!
• Special outfit for the dog
• Holiday music – We have everything from Johnny Cash to Kelly Clarkson to Twisted Sister. Yep – that’s a thing.
• Celebrating the birth of Christ at church on Christmas Eve
• Giving to a family in need. This year, we actually travelled to Neah Bay (the far Western tip of the United States) with a few Presbyterian churches and helped throw the annual Christmas party for the children of the Makah tribe. I loved that the party started with gingerbread houses and that we share many of the same traditions.
• Personalized photo gifts for my kids – some years it’s a calendar, some years it’s a book I’ve written, but the theme is usually the same – our beloved dogs! I am a Foodist is their favorite – an irreverent look at Foodism which is our pug’s religion of choice.
• Books – here are some of my favorites! We used to read a Christmas book aloud every night. Now I just leave them out and hope they get picked up.

What traditions does your family have? Any new ones you want to start this year?