Comparing Our Family Christmas Traditions — Brian’s Blog

As my young family has grown over the past few years, we've been developing our family Christmas traditions. How does your family celebrate this holiday?

My wife and I come from similar religious and cultural backgrounds, so how we celebrate Christmas with our kids has a kind of typical "Leave It to Beaver" protestant-American feel to it.

We attend church (two services) on Christmas Eve with a light dinner crammed in between. We open packages on Christmas morning, and have a big Christmas dinner in the early afternoon. We put candy in the kids' stockings, along with other small gifts. Since we still have young children, we set out cookies and milk for Santa.

One tradition we've started in the past few years is for the family to have a photo taken together in front of our church's altar. We make sure to include my wife's mother as well. My hope is to get quite a few of these done through the years so people can see how our family is growing up.

Having two teenage daughters and a "tweener" daughter, the fashionista side of them comes out for this photo. The outfits, hair and makeup has to be perfect, while my two boys like to be nicely dressed as well.

I'll share the 2014 edition of that photo in a future blog.

How does you family do Christmas? Are you a Christmas Eve or Christmas morning family when it comes to presents? How about your meals? Do you have special foods that you have only at Christmas?

Leave us a Facebook comment on your family's traditions, whatever they may be.