Blogmas Day 9: My Christmas Traditions

I always love reading about what other people's holiday traditions are - sometimes they are similar to what me and my family do and sometimes they are so unique and I don't know, I just like reading about what everyone else is up to during the holiday season. So, I thought I would share a few of my holiday traditions!

1.) A real Christmas tree

We are team Real Tree all the way over here but moreso, we have a tradition of taking a picture every year of Nate bringing the tree in the house. My mom and dad had this tradition (and still do after 40+ years of marriage!) and I just really loved the idea of being able to flip through a photo album and find the same picture, year after year after year. So I decided that once I got married, we would do the same! I wrote about it last year here. Here is our very first photo from the first year we were married in 2009:

Five years later in 2014:

And another five years later in 2019:

2.) Shrimp on Christmas Eve

My family has always had our big Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve and in doing so, we serve appetizers, desserts, and shrimp. Cold shrimp, fried shrimp, or any combination thereof. I've asked my mom over the years where this tradition came from and she's told me that her family/parents did the same thing when she was a kid growing up in Michigan. Her parents threw a big party on Christmas Eve that at the time, was mostly for neighbors and friends since her parents had no family in town. They served shrimp and daiquiris and it's just stuck all these years later. It is not Christmas Eve without shrimp.

Even messaging our family that lives out of state we always check and make sure everyone has cooked up some shrimp for themselves on Christmas Eve!

3.) Christmas ornament collection

This one is probably not unique to anyone but, collecting Christmas ornaments of all the places we go/things we do throughout the year. If the material is right, I'll take a Sharpie to the back and write the year on it. 

4.) A holiday weekend getaway

It started in 2011, my family and I decided we wanted to take a trip up to Sedona to see a Christmas lights attraction that we'd been wanting to see for a while. You can read about it here. We did so, then took the long way home through Flagstaff to play in the snow and the whole thing was just so dang fun that we decided to do it the next year. And the next year. And so on and so forth. We started in Sedona with this same itinerary, and in the years since we've done Prescott a handful of times and just last year we went to Greer. You can read about that weekend here. 

5.) Holiday baking

This one is also probably not unique to anyone but every year my mom, my sister, and I get together to make the biggest mess in the kitchen that we can, and also bake some Christmas treats while we're at it. We bake cherry chocolate kiss cookies, buckeyes, peanut clusters, decorate sugar cookies, and anything else we have the energy for. 

And then I lick the chocolate out of all the bowls like the animal that I truly am.

Those are a few of my holiday traditions - what are yours?