This is the first Christmas that I will not be at home with my family.
Since Kevin and I got to go home for a whole week for Thanksgiving, we realized it wasn't realistic for us to go home again just a few weeks later for Christmas.
While this all makes sense in my head, it is still hard to think about spending the holiday so far away from my family.
My Christmas' growing up were pretty wonderful. My parents always reminded us what this holiday is truly about, and they never let us get too wrapped up in the materialistic end of Christmas. This is something I hope to make sure my own children are aware of one day.
These are a few Christmas traditions or even just re occurrences that I grew up with.
Clementines
Clemnetines are little orange balls of deliciousness. My mom would always keep a giant bowl of them in the house during the holidays-and all winter really. They are just so cute & yummy! I bought bag of them last week at the grocery store and the girl ringing me up looked as if she had never seen them before.
"Are these tiny oranges?" she said.
haha
It's a Wonderful Life
I still can't believe it when people tell me they have never seen this movie. It is a Christmas Classic! It's usually on tv around the holidays, and my family would always make a point to sit down and watch it. We watched it a few times on Christmas Eve, and I just love it.
Go watch it if you never have, I promise it's the best!
Driving through town looking at lights
So I don't think the lights we drove around to see were ever this extravagant, but you get the idea. I remember being younger and riding around in the back of our mini-van, going for miles just to look at lights. Town square lights, store lights, or just random people's homes lights, they're all beautiful.
& my sisters and I would oooh and ahhh from the backseats.
Stringing popcorn
My mom taught my sisters and I the art of popcorn stringing when we were younger, and just about every year we would do this to our Christmas tree.
There's a tutorial you can follow
here if you've never done this before.
We would use cranberries too!
Opening 1 gift on Christmas Eve
I'm not sure why we started to do this, maybe because my sisters & I were just too impatient-but we started opening 1 gift each on Christmas Eve, right before we would go to bed. My parents would usually pick which one we could open, so it wouldn't be such a big gift. This would get us really excited for the next morning.
It was like a little Christmas present teaser.
With all of these wonderful traditions I know Kevin and I will be able to come up with some good holiday memories this year, even while we are far from home.
xox
