In all of the years that Jeremy and I have been married, we have not had a Christmas where we were able to be home and relax. Typically we run to all of our families houses for each celebration. We absolutely love doing so but this year we needed to stay home in NC for the holidays. Once again surgery was just a few days after Christmas, I wanted to have the house prepared and I was trying to eliminate ways that cyclical vomiting could flare up. So this year was the first year we stayed home.
It was genuinely so nice to stay put and create some new traditions with the kids. To which, this is what we are about to dive into! May be a little past Christmas but hey, why not tell ya anyways! So we started out with taking the time to decorate the house. Not too much but the kids absolutely love being able to put up some decor. So we had some inside and outside of the house. We also took the time to wrap presents for each other and everyone kept them inside of their rooms until Christmas morning. But my favorite part was Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve we spent the day baking. We made 10 different types of cookies but we did a fun mix up. We baked off only 4 types of cookies while the rest we put into the freezer! This year we used plastic bags but next year I plan to go thrifting to find all of the glass cookware and use those instead or maybe some sort of container. Any who, the goal with this is that we could bake off those cookies at later times. To which we recently did and I absolutely loved the Sunflower butter cookies!!!
This was such a hit with the family that I think we will be adding it to our Christmas traditions. It was such a fun way to bond as a family, add in some baked goods to the holidays and stock the freezer. I wasn’t able to do as much baking this past year as I normally like but this one day of baking definitely scratched the itch. I think we will do the same next year but add in the hot cocoa bar with this. I attempted to make hot cocoa in the crock pot, and I did make it, but the glass lid shattered into the mix so we had to through it away. Y’all I was so mad! But next year we will try again!
Once we made some cookies and made new hot cocoa, we packed ourselves up and went out to look at Christmas lights. We managed to find a family that puts on a nice display until 9 pm. So sadly we only got to see about 10-15 minutes before it was shut off but next year we will definitely be adding it to our traditions and remembering to go a little earlier in the evening. Shoot we may have to go a few times just randomly!
I look forward to seeing what other traditions we add to our family as the years come but I think this was a good start for us! First year at home for Christmas and I think it was a success!!