Our Christmas traditions

Over the last twelve years, it's been so much fun to combine Christmas traditions and create our own. I thought I'd share our traditions with you!

• Cord insists that we not decorate until the day after Thanksgiving, which is a holiday we both enjoy so fully, we don't want to distract ourselves from it (same with Christmas music, although I personally could listen to it all year long and put my tree up in October if he'd let me).
• We try and make it to the Messiah sing in and then I proceed to sing the entire Messiah along with MoTab all month long!
• We love to give neighbor gifts that mean something...some years we're more successful than others.
  
• Christmas chain- we make a chain of strips of paper inter-linked and on each strip is written a blessing in our lives because of the gospel. Every day we take a few off and read them.
• We love good Christmas movies that must be watched every year: Meet me in St. Louis, Miracle on 34th street, It's a wonderful life, The bishops wife, Christmas Vacation (a classic!), The Grinch who stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Clause is coming to town, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and Home Alone....to name a few!
• Candy cane countdown to Christmas.
• We read a story about Christmas every night, either a book or one from my personal collection of inspirational stories.
  
• Baking and gaining weight seem to have become a Christmas tradition...I'd like to avoid the latter this year!
• We try to give back...
  
• We eat dinner on Christmas eve, which is different from my family...it's a Norwegian tradition. We have prime rib and yorkshire pudding along with many traditional side dishes. We then open one present (always) pajamas, we read the Christmas story in the new testament...and we used to act it out, but Cayden is getting too cool for that so we're going to tweak that a bit this year.
  
• We stay up late on Christmas eve...you know why!
• On Christmas morning, I get up early and make breakfast casserole and orange julius. We line the kids up in the kitchen or on the stairs, youngest to oldest and then introduce them into "wonderland".
• After we open presents (and get a good nap) we enjoy leftovers and play games and watch movies...we also go visit Grandma and Grandpa.
• One more fun thing that we do after Christmas, we get out all our neighbor gifts that are edible and eat them on New Years Eve!

This probably isn't the complete list and I'm always looking for ways to make this time of year special and carry that feeling throughout the year...