12 Days of Christmas Day 8: Family Time

For me, the biggest joy of the holiday season is spending time with family and friends. It is my self-care. I love hanging out with people I love. There are so many magical and special things to do this season. Here are a few things we love doing as a family this time of year.

1. Decorating cookies and gingerbread houses: OK, so not everyone participates in the baking, but everyone definitely gets in on eating the cookies. This is a super simple tradition that my kids love. This year, my son chose to make some M&M cookies that he took to his classroom party. My daughter made chocolate chip ones for her teacher. We have more baking to do for our family Christmas get-together. 

Every year, we also decorate a gingerbread house. We get one and our two kids decorate it together. I think they eat more candy then ends up on the house itself, but they look forward to this every year.

2. Look at Christmas lights. We love driving around looking at lights. There's another place in our town that we love to go walking along the river while enjoying the lights. Another fun thing is to print out a free light scavenger hunt and turn it into a game. Lights are a fun tradition for our family!

3.  Walk-Thru-Bethlehem: 

We love to celebrate the reason for the season each year at Christmas. One tradition we love is to find a Walk-thru-Bethlehem. These are not just your typical living nativity, but an entire walk-thru program where you get the sights, sounds, and feels of Bethlehem the night Jesus was born. Where we live, these are all over the place and easy to find. We missed this one this year...for some reason the season has just been so busy and they were over and done with before we even thought about them. 

4. Sprinkles of Fun:

There are so many fun activities to participate in this time of year and we usually try to do some of them. One year we took our kids to ICE. Everything in the exhibit is made from ice. There are colored ice displays and crystal clear ice displays....usually surrounding a certain theme. There are even fun ice slides at the very end. If you have never gone, this is super fun.

Another fun activity is going sledding. Whenever we get the chance, we definitely do this as a family. 

Something else we look forward to is taking a carriage ride through some of the lights in our area. It is so magical and fun with Christmas tunes playing and the lights changing colors. 

Whatever your traditions and whatever you do for fun, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and Christmas!