Opportunities to create family traditions occur all year round but it's this time of the year that we really think about them the most. Everyone has cherished family traditions they grew up with and that they want to preserve and continue with their own family.
We love this time of year because it's a built-in reason to make that extra effort to spend quality time with friends and family. It makes us motivated to clean house, cull through our closets and drawers to make donations, learn new recipes to make baked goods gifts, and stay up a little later and hope for snow. Below are a few of our own family traditions as well some shared with us by good friends. Please share your family traditions with us as some of our favorites were borrowed from others!
Image: Sunset/Thomas J. Story
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We always go to the zoo on Thanksgiving morning. It's usually just us and the animals.
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On a side note - where did those great colored pencils come from?
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My mom was super creative, and always put together an advent calendar for me and my brothers. It was a wooden frame with 24 small boxes gridded inside it that my grandfather made, and it would be covered with wrapping paper. Starting on Dec. 1, each night before going to bed, we took turns popping a square open. There would be a note inside telling us to look in a certain place in the house. We'd run there crazily excited, to find another note directing us somewhere else, and so on. When we'd arrive at a final place, there would be a small gift or item. Sometimes it was as small as a pack of gum for each of us, but it always varied. On Christmas Eve, we'd always each find a new pair of pajamas, and that was usually the highlight.
Over the years, we grew to love this tradition and to look forward to it more than anything else throughout the holiday season. I will definitely be re-doing it for my children when they are old enough!
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We decorate our tree the weekend after Thansgiving and get Thai take-out. The Thai carry-over is from when my husband and I were childless and living in the mountains we would always ski on Thanksgiving since the slopes were empty and the only restaurants open after were Thai.
Speaking of food - is the plate in the photo Heath Ceramics?
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I got those crayons as a gift for my little cousin, they have them at anthropologie. Around $8 I think.
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