Kelly's Korner - Show Us Your Life - Christmas Traditions

I love Christmas! And since Ed and I were married, even before the kids came along, starting our own traditions has been a big thing for me. Things we do every year:

• Christmas baking!! I love to do lots of sweets - cookies, fudge, brownies, cake, and cinnamon candy. I usually wrap up most of it and give it to friends and family as gifts. I try to make a batch of cookies for Ed to take to his employees as well.
• Christmas parades!! I love them. For anyone who hasn't been to a small town Christmas parade the majority of the parade is made up of local fire and rescue vehicles, a few dump trucks and tractor trailers, and sometimes just random people and businesses. But there is usually at least one high school marching band, a ton of girl scout and boy scout troops and several dance studios. Small town charm!
• Christmas Eve - we usually open one gift and have let Gabrielle open the gift from the dogs. Our Christmas Eve meal has changed over the years. We started out doing Ed's family traditional antipasto tray before going to church and then having our big meal on Christmas Day. But now our tradition is we have our big meal (usually some type of Italian dish ~ lasagna, spaghetti & meatballs, etc.) on Christmas Eve and Christmas day is leftovers.
• Christmas Lights - On Christmas Eve we go driving around to look at all the Christmas decorations and lights, sometimes before going to church and sometimes after, it just depends on what time the church service is we are attending.
• Christmas Day - The past three years I have made a sausage, egg and cheese casserole for breakfast. While it is cooking Gabrielle looks at all the stuff Santa brought her and we open gifts. We keep this day pretty relaxing. We're in no hurry to get out of pajamas and pretty much lay around most of the day and eat.

So this year will be very interesting since we will have a new crawler in the house! Gabrielle was only 3 months old her first Christmas and by her second was walking around and understood "no" and "don't touch" to some degree. But this will be a new experience having a little one who is all over and doesn't understand anything about staying away from such things. I guess once again the bottom half of our tree will remain undecorated!!

Today will be the big day of decorating the tree and the house. Gabrielle is ecstatic and has asked over and over the past few days about the tree and everything. I got the Little People nativity out yesterday. This was a family gift from my mom on Gabrielle's second Christmas. Gabrielle absolutely LOVES it and I'm sure Samantha will as well.

Here are some photos from last Christmas!

Dressed for Christmas Sunday!!

Making an ornament for our tree.

Posing for our Christmas card.



And some photos from 2007 (Gabrielle's first parade!)


This year will also be nice because last year Ed was working, working, working. Unfortunately he had to miss out on a lot of our traditions but all the hard work paid off and I am fairly certain he won't have to miss out on anything this year for Samantha's first Christmas.