Our Family Christmas Decorating Traditions!

Like most families, we love decorating for Christmas.  And this year we are celebrating the holiday for the first time in our new house so we went a little crazy.  There is something so special about surrounding yourself with the bright lights on the Christmas tree, the smell of cinnamon in the kitchen and special ornaments that remind you of Christmas past.  It’s a month of nostalgia and secretly I never want it to end.Before we had kids, Mark and I decorated our tree with our favorite things.  He loves the berries and pine cones and I love Santa ornaments.  After all of these years, we put up with each other’s decorating “must haves” because it means something to each of us.  And even adults need to feel a little “Christmas Comfort” this time of year.

Now that we have kids we have added a few new traditions.  Like this Christmas Past picture collage.  We get to look back at all of our holiday’s together and see how much the kids have grown.

And we can’t forget our new friend “Buddy”.  He makes his way to our home each year and gets more and more creative about where he hides (it helps that a new house brings new hiding places too).

Mark’s family has passed down many incredible decorations that we now display.  I’m not sure how old this Santa decoration is but the kids flock to it like ice cream.  We tend to find it upstairs playing with their toys.

With our move last Christmas, we didn’t bring out our decorations (just the tree). So we had the kids make their own ornaments out of paper.  They came up with some creative decorations that we just couldn’t part with.  So this year we decided to give them their own tree to display their holiday art work, school ornaments and old pictures.

My kids love to hang ornaments on the tree and even move them around so we see all of them at different times.

Christmas is really magical not just for the kids but for us adults too.  It’s great to sit back and watch the magic in their eyes like it was in ours so many years ago.  We hope you all have a magical holiday season!

What’s your favorite holiday decoration tradition?