Holiday Traditions.

Growing up, my family definitely had little traditions that we did each year, especially around the holidays. With Christmas just around the corner, it had me thinking...what traditions would end and which new ones would begin? My family always did Christmas Eve at my Aunt's house, where we would have a ton of appetizers, homemade cookies and open up our Christmas jammies. We would stay there until dark and then head home while watching a Christmas Classic like "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" or "Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer".

To this day, I watch those movies because they remind me so much of the excitement I had knowing Santa would be coming that night. Christmas morning was always done at our house with my dad recording it all. We would take turns opening presents one by one until they were all done. Then, we made phone calls to family to thank them for the wonderful gifts. When we were young and got toys, we would immediately play with them the rest of the day, never getting out of our Christmas jammies. I remember all of these things like they were yesterday, even though I haven't done that in years. Since Austin and I have moved down here, family has come to see us, each taking a few days, but we always wanted Christmas morning to ourselves.

Now that we have Tylar, we are heading up north to separate time with everyone. This may be the new norm for the next couple years but we also talked about how when Tylar gets older, we want her to have Christmas morning at our house and not up north. Every year since Austin and I have been married, our traditions are definitely decorating the house, putting up the tree, baking cookies and watching Christmas movies every night.

What are your Christmas traditions? What traditions did you keep and which ones did you introduce?