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Hey sweeties! This is Aly. This time of year always makes me think of Traditions. Family traditions, but especially holiday traditions. I love thinking back on my life and realizing that so many of my most wonderful memories have been centered around traditions that my parents set, and carried through with every year. Being a parent now, I realize the time, love, and effort that goes into each and every tradition that is established. Today I want to share a few of our families holiday traditions with you. I also am thinking of traditions that I don’t love, along with new traditions I want to possibly start.

Holiday Traditions I Love

Advent Calendars

Around our house, there is a countdown to the countdown. The kids love putting the pieces on our advent calendars. They also get one of those chocolate advents each year that they love. (The chocolate in those is like wax, but they love looking forward to that little treat each day.)

Christmas Books

I love to read through our Christmas books. They are one of the things we anticipate as we are unpacking the Christmas boxes. We like to add a new book to our Christmas Library every year. My favorite that we read this year is “The Three Trees.” We also started the tradition last year of reading “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”

Holiday Clothes

I absolutely LOVE buying my girls cute Christmas shirts. The minute I see them in the stores, I have to buy them some. I LOVE LOVE LOVE them. Every year, aIso buy my kids new Christmas dressy clothes. I love to dress them up and take their photo in front of the tree. They usually don’t want to cooperate, but I don’t even care, I love it anyway.

Visiting Santa

Every year we take our kids to visit Santa. I like to do this towards the first part of the month so that the kids can give Santa their list, and that the list cannot change anymore!

Holiday Lights
I have to be honest… Christmas lights really aren’t my thing. I am a little OCD about how Christmas lights look. I like houses with a classic one row of straight, white lights. Every year we do go look at Christmas lights, because the kids absolutely love it. We go to Christmas Village where they have little houses with different decorations and themes, with lots of lights. This year they even had a Christmas Train to ride.

Christmas Cookies

We always make sugar cookies to decorate for Santa. The kids get so creative with their art on them. Such a mess, but so much fun!

True Meaning
I love all of the commercial things that come along with Christmas, but my absolute favorite part of the season is celebrating the birth of Christ. Every year I have a deeper understanding and love for this special Spirit that we celebrate at this time of year. My husband’s family established a tradition many years ago to have a Jerusalem Dinner at the first part of December. At the dinner we dress as people at the time of Christ’s birth may have. We eat fish, unleaven bread, grapes, avacodos, cheeses, and things that may have been there then. We think about Jesus and his parents. We think about the true meaning of this holiday. It is by far my favorite thing we do during the month of December.

Some of the Traditions that I don’t love:

• Gingerbread houses
• Christmas Lights on houses
• FREEZING temperatures

Some Traditions I am thinking of starting:

• Live Nativity
• Local Nativity Displays
• Elf on the Shelf
• Christmas Book Advent

These are a few of the things that consume us at this time of year. I am so grateful for my family and the traditions that we have! What are some of your traditions? What do you love or hate about the holidays?

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One random winner will be selected an notified before the store closes. You can comment through December 24th at12:00pm Mountain Time. I will post and notify the winner that afternoon, before the site goes down. Hope your holidays are happy!