Merry Christmas, y’all! Can you believe that we’re already to this point in the year? 2014 has been nothing but a blur! It feels like we just did the whole Christmas thing, yet here we are again…December 1st. Craziness!
I’m super excited to be kicking off the Christmas Traditions Blog Tour today. We have such a great line up of amazing bloggers….and I can’t wait to get an inside look at their family traditions! If you’re looking for new traditions to start with your family, or are just interested in how other celebrate….this tour is for you! I’ll be posting a round up each day of the tour, and I’ll also be updating this page so you won’t miss a post.
Most of our Christmas traditions involve our tree. Decorating the tree is an event in itself. We pour our favorite hot drinks {for us, that’s coffee, of course!} into our Christmas mugs and turn on our favorite Christmas tunes before we begin trimming the tree.
We usually like to start a fire, but temps were in the upper 70’s, so we went with the more practical “Yule Log” on TV this year. It’s not quite as cozy, but it did the job. 
Our tree decorations are simple. There is no theme or color coordination. I threw up the music sheet garland and paper cones I made last year, but the rest is just filled in with our personal ornaments.
One of my favorite parts of the season is unwrapping our ornaments each year. They all hold so many special memories and each has a story. We buy ornaments to commemorate big life events {like our wedding and first Christmas together} and all of the trips and vacations that we take together. My two best friends and I also swap ornaments instead of gifts every year.
Once we get all of the ornaments onto the tree, we finish sipping our coffee, enjoy the glow of the tree and admire our work. It is a visual reminder of God’s goodness in our lives. Life hasn’t been perfect, and we’ve certainly had our trials….but each of these ornaments is a monument to something amazing that we’ve been blessed with. It just makes this season all that much sweeter when we are reminded of that and can respond with gratefulness.
Another favorite tradition is our annual Christmas photo. We usually snap a photo by the tree. When I was in college, our College pastor and his wife would invite everyone over to their house for a huge Christmas party before we left for the semester. Their home was decorated beautifully, but the thing that stuck out to me the most was their yearly family Christmas photos. It wasn’t anything fancy. Just photos taken with a point and shoot camera and stuck into an acrylic frame with the year written on it. It was so cool to see how their family had grown and changed over the years. I knew then that this was a tradition I wanted to do with my own family.
We frame our photo every year and display them all together at Christmas. I can’t wait for next year when we can take a photo with our new little one! It’s so exciting!
Next up on the tour is Abby from Just a Girl and Her Blog….and I’ll be posting the rest of today’s line up a little later.
What are your favorite Christmas traditions?
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