38| My 3 (or More) Favorite Christmas Traditions with Kids
Hi friends, welcome back to Intentional Motherhood. I'm your host, Kelsey Redd. If you caught my episode last week, you know that this flu season really has more to do with the lifestyle changes we make in this winter season than about viruses that suddenly get bigger and stronger than any other time of year. And so now we're going talk about some of my favorite holiday traditions that keep everyone healthy, sane, well rested, and regulated. So let's dive into it.
Kelsey Redd:Of course, I always want to jump in and remind you before we get started to make sure you're jumping on my email list so that you can be in the know of all the fun things that are coming up, especially my prayer focused Bible study that will be starting in January, as well as just having access to all the amazing resources that I've created that go along with a lot of our podcast episodes, most for free, a few for purchase. One of my favorite ones that I just put up on my wall is my four part apology printable that describes the four steps, the four parts of the apology using eyes, mouth, heart and hands to make sincere apologies to siblings when we inevitably face conflict. So make sure you're getting on that list. It's also just a great way to stay in touch because you know I love to connect with you. I love to hear what exactly you want to hear episodes about.
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Kelsey Redd:Intentional. Mothers. So this episode comes directly from some of my listeners giving me feedback about what they want to hear. And what they asked for is to know about what traditions do I incorporate into my family. And I'm going to keep this focused on holiday traditions since that's the time of year we're in.
Kelsey Redd:But I actually have some amazing traditions that I do at all different times of the year that we'll be talking about in other episodes as we move out of the holiday season. You guys know that I feel strongly about rhythms and rituals, and that's because it's these rhythms and rituals that create the heartbeat of the childhood. It's the things that we do over and over again that ground our children into the memories of the home and the family. Relationships. And by having some continuity through even weekly, daily, quarterly, seasonal, holiday, annual rhythms, our children know what to expect.
Kelsey Redd:They have that positive anticipatory experience of knowing what is coming and getting really excited about it. It builds memories. It builds our family culture. You guys know I'm all about family culture. But this memory building is what creates the relationships that go on when all the children have moved out of the house.
Kelsey Redd:I want you to think about what some of your favorite things to talk about are with friends or relatives, cousins. I know for me, it's a lot of times we're reminiscing about things we've done in our past. Me and my husband will still talk about, remember these amazing experiences we had on this certain trip. And I can't wait to do that again. I can't wait to go to this place again.
Kelsey Redd:Especially when you do the same things over and over again, you build that bridge from past experience to future experience, and it unifies all the people that were in that experience with you. So that's a little bit about why I am passionate about having some really beautiful rhythms and rituals and traditions in my family. Just as a little side note, this isn't one of the three favorite holiday traditions that I was going to tell you about, but I have to just mention it because I'm hoping to get to do this tradition this next week. One of my all time favorite seasonal traditions is that we make homemade donuts and drink apple cider on the first snowfall of the year, or I should say of the winter season. So as it starts to get cold, as we start to see frost on the ground, my kids start to get really excited because they start to say, Is it gonna snow?
Kelsey Redd:Is it gonna snow? Are we gonna have our donuts? And I say, It's not snowing yet. It's getting colder. We're in fall.
Kelsey Redd:It's gonna be winter soon and the snow is coming. And they get so excited waiting and looking for snow, checking for snow on really cold mornings. And we watch this time of year to know when the snow is coming so that we can be prepared to have a cozy day with homemade donuts and apple cider that the whole family really enjoys and looks forward to. And I especially like this one because I know there are lots of people out there who dread this time of year. I am not one of them, I love the winter, but I will admit it has become a million times harder since having kids and so now I really understand why some people just dread this time of year.
Kelsey Redd:But I love having something that we specifically look forward to that other people might see as something to be stressed about. I know this winter snowy season is coming. Instead it flips that paradigm and actually gives us something that we are so excited because we know that the snow means something really special in our family. So that's just one little bonus tradition that we have coming up hopefully this week. But today I want to get into my three favorite holiday traditions, and I'm probably going to combine a couple of them because there are so many that are so fun that I can't not say them all.
Kelsey Redd:So the first ones I want to mention are monthly traditions. And I like doing monthly traditions because it actually becomes a daily rhythm as part of a larger family tradition. So for instance, the entire month of November, starting on November 1, have our thankful tree that we put up on the wall and we add a thankful leaf every night at dinner. Each person of the family thinks of something they're grateful for, they write it on their leaf and then we tape it up on the thankful tree. And that becomes a daily ritual that the kids know all month long this is something that we're doing.
Kelsey Redd:And of course there are nights when we forget or we aren't able to sit down at the dinner table and our kids usually at bedtime will say, We forgot our thankful leaves! We have to do our thankful leaves! And we'll either do it right before bed or even say, Okay, we're going do it first thing in the morning. We can't forget our thankful leaf. And of course it ties in with Thanksgiving and focusing this month on gratitude because it's really easy and my kids are slipping right into this of putting Christmas lists together and being very focused.
Kelsey Redd:We call it the case of the wants. We all tend to get a really bad case of the I Wants this time of year because when we focus on things we want, it's amazing how you can think of more and more things that you want. Of course the opposite is also true, when you think of things you're grateful for, it's amazing how you can be so satisfied with what you have and think of more and more things that you're grateful for. So it's a little bit of a nice antidote to the case of the I Wants that we tend to fall into as we're thinking about things we are hoping we get for Christmas. Tying into this first monthly tradition, probably my actual all time favorite tradition around the holidays is having a really simple Advent calendar.
Kelsey Redd:I love Advent calendars because depending on how you do it, it really is a way to keep your focus on Christ the entire month of December. Again, it's so easy to get distracted with all the other more commercial aspects of this time of year, and of the Christmas season. But having that Advent calendar helps us at least every day bring our attention back to Christ. And there are obviously all sorts of Advent calendars. And I'll tell you my favorite was the one I had in my childhood, which was the really beautiful little handmade.
Kelsey Redd:I remember my mom made it when I don't know how young I was, but I remember it all through my childhood, but I remember that she had made it. But I remember it was a whole canvas that showed Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem. And so each day of December you got to move them one step closer to Bethlehem and you just had the little piece of Mary and Joseph on a donkey and then you moved them all the way up till Christmas Eve, you put them in the stable and that was the day Jesus was born. I like the Advent calendars that have the focus on the Nativity story and visualizing the nativity story because then it is even more of a focus on Christ rather than I know there's lots of Advent calendars that just have little treats and goodies. I know some people incorporate with those a Bible verse that they can read each day that talks about Christ's birth, and I think that's a really beautiful way to do it.
Kelsey Redd:The advent calendar we have now, I honestly was just trying to find the closest thing I could find to what I had in childhood. It's a really cute little nativity scene. But each day you take one piece like one shepherd and hang it in the scene or one star and hang it in the scene or one camel. And by the end of the twenty five days, you have the entire nativity scene. And we always save Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus for the last three days so that that culminates our nativity scene in the Advent calendar.
Kelsey Redd:Again, like these type of traditions that stretch on for a long period of time, such as the entire month or the entire twenty five days of December, where you're doing something every day because it builds in the rhythm of the daily experience as part of the larger tradition and keeps your focus where you want it to be throughout the entire month and gives a consistent anchor point to that focus and that value that you want to emphasize, whether it's the nativity story and the focus on Jesus or the gratitude in the month of November. Those are the ways I like to structure my month so that that is a constant anchor. Now, a couple other of my favorite holiday traditions that just are random to my family. So because I sometimes find Christmas morning a little overstimulating with so many presents and so many gifts all being opened all at once, I actually try to spread out the gift giving a little bit throughout the month of December, which might be different for some people, but I find that when my kids have more than maybe four or five gifts to open in a given day, they get overwhelmed and overstimulated and they lose the ability to really be grateful for what they get because they either are starting to feel so overwhelmed by everything that they have or they've forgotten what the first present was they opened, or they get more of the dopamine rush from the actual opening and surprise, that they don't even actually fully get to enjoy the gift that they were given, or the couple gifts that they were given.
Kelsey Redd:So in an effort to spread out the gift giving a little bit, we do Christmas pajamas given on the first. So as we're going to bed on November 30, they open their first Christmas gift, which is Christmas pajamas for the kids. And I think this is fun because they get to wear the pajamas all month long and we get to really soak in the Christmas festivity and the cute little Christmas PJs all month rather than maybe just giving the Christmas PJs on Christmas Eve or whatnot. And then we celebrate St. Nick's Day, which is probably something that most people have never even heard of unless you're maybe from a different European country.
Kelsey Redd:But the December 6 is actually called St. Nick's Day. And because I've had some hesitation around how we want to do Santa Claus in my family, which I'm not going to go into maybe it's too controversial. Needless to say, we've experimented with some options. And we got into this habit of celebrating Saint Nick Day, where we emphasized that Santa, St.
Kelsey Redd:Nicholas, is bringing a surprise gift this night. And in our family that's always one classic Christmas book because I love the classic Christmas books, especially the ones that teach really beautiful morals and stories and good messages. And each year our family has gotten one of these really classic Christmas stories. And so we've built up a great collection of Christmas books that we only get out at Christmas time. They're put away with the Christmas decorations and when the decorations come back out, the books come back out and you would be amazed at how excited my kids are to see these books that are going on five and six years old now.
Kelsey Redd:Even the Little Kitty books that we had when they were really young, they're so excited to see. And the books that they just have gotten the last year, they're so excited to read and remember again. Some of our favorites are Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, year Don't Tell My Kids, we're getting The Polar Express. Some of these really nice, well written, classic stories. So that is our St.
Kelsey Redd:Nick celebration day on December 6. Okay, so my next favorite holiday tradition that I'm going to tell you about is how we prepare for the last few days leading up to Christmas. And we do a couple things, but I told you I'm going to lump a few traditions in because there are just so many that are fun that I can't even narrow it down. But the last Sunday before Christmas Day, whenever day Christmas is going to fall on, the last Sunday before Christmas Day, we always watch as a family the Nativity Story, which is a really beautiful movie that was put out sometime in the early 2000s. I remember I was in high school when I first watched it in theaters.
Kelsey Redd:So it must have been in the early 2000s. And I thought it was just such a well done production of really showing a more realistic and true narrative of what the experience mainly for Mary and Joseph would have been like to have this miraculous conception amidst the social and political climate that they were living in and what that really would have been like for them that it wasn't this happy, bubbly, beautiful story that we sometimes imagine it to be. Of course, there was God's grace and there were miracles. But there was also a lot of hardship I imagine. And this movie called The Nativity Story really portrays that in a respectful and reverent and beautiful way, that it has become my all time favorite Christmas movie and I make my entire family watch it every Christmas.
Kelsey Redd:One time a year, that's all I ask for. We watch this movie on the last Sunday before Christmas. And it really sets the tone for me now as an adult, and probably not so much for my kids, but maybe they'll grow into it as they mature to really understand the beauty of the gift that the Christ child was, and the sacrifices that Mary and Joseph had to make, and be willing to make to play their ultimate roles in this eternally and infinitely significant role that God asked them to play on earth. So as we go into Christmas week, I guess we'll call it, we do one more fun tradition, which is on the July 23, the whole family sleeps under the Christmas tree with the Christmas tree lights on. And this has become a tradition actually from before my husband and I ever even had kids.
Kelsey Redd:We heard of another family that did it and we just thought it was so cute and so fun that we started doing it well over a decade ago, way before we had kids. We just thought it was a cute idea for the whole family to get snuggled up on the living room floor under the Christmas tree lights and sleep all night out there together. It's just kind of a cozy, magical evening. Of course, we're reading our Christmas stories. Maybe we're drinking hot chocolate if I'm feeling generous.
Kelsey Redd:And we all cuddle up and just have that magical night with the twinkling Christmas lights on. And it has really no purpose other than just for fun and for excitement and for the magic of the season. So my last and favorite holiday tradition that we do this time of year that I can't even necessarily say we do at a certain way or on a certain day in December is just acts of service and acts of kindness. As you well know, it's so easy for kids to get so focused on everything they want and all the things that Santa is going to bring them that it can be really hard to bring the focus back to the true meaning of the season, which is something that I am probably more serious about than is necessary given my children's ages. But I just feel really strongly about wanting to keep the focus on what I want to keep the focus on, which is on Christ and the gift that God gave us by sending Jesus to the world to save us, the gift of Christ's life and sacrifice and death, and how we can emulate Christ by giving good gifts to God and to others and serving and helping others.
Kelsey Redd:And of course, that's what we all want the season to be about. And it's such a beautiful time of year because everyone is more in that zone and more focused on being kind and helpful and serving others than maybe we are the rest of the year. We typically have some sort of service project that we do, whether it's a charity organization where we can put together some gifts to give to families in need, or providing some sort of anonymous gift for someone maybe even in our neighborhood who we know is having a hard year and providing some food and gifts and treats and goodies for that family. Or even one of my favorites is within our own home. We typically have a jar that has a bunch of strips of papers that just have random little tiny kid friendly acts of service.
Kelsey Redd:And we'll just throughout the day, I try to do it with one kid at a time when no one else is around. I'll let a kid pick out a piece of paper and see what random act of kindness that they could maybe do today. Maybe it's go make your brother's bed, or maybe it's help mom and dad with the dishes, or maybe even just write a note, a love note to someone and give it to them because you know, they're going to feel really appreciated by it. But I love to just do something that brings our attention back to kindness, and goodness and helping others. So there you have it, there are three or more of my favorite holiday Christmas traditions.
Kelsey Redd:And I would love to hear some of your favorite holiday traditions. So sign up for my email list. My links are all in the show notes below. Or of course you can go to Instagram creating. Intentional.
Kelsey Redd:Mothers. And I think I haven't mentioned this in the last few episodes, my Linktree is also an easy way to find me. Just linktreetr.eekelsierd and you can get on my email list and get access to all the things I've created. And please be in touch and share some of your favorite holiday traditions with me. I love to hear from you guys.
Kelsey Redd:And I will see you next time on Intentional Motherhood.