Since starting a family, almost 8 years ago, I’ve been thinking about different holiday traditions.

As a young child, we got together with my mom’s side of the family a lot and not my dad’s that often.

When my grandma died (I was 13), we stopped getting together so much but I have a couple aunts we did get together with a lot- especially one who has always treated me like a daughter.

We still get together with her a lot.

Throughout the years, I have had jobs (especially 1) that had me so busy this time of the year (thank you, retail) so I barely had time to breath during the whole season. With the job change, I’m only working a few days a week so I have time to actually do stuff with my kids and it has me thinking on the lines of Christmas traditions.

I ran across my Facebook memories yesterday, after my 2 year old helped me bake cookies and found last year on the same day, she helped me bake cookies as well.

With our new found food restrictions, she and I can’t partake in events like cookie exchanges like my mom, cousins and aunts did one year- she couldn’t eat anything with butter or milk and I couldn’t eat anything with flour and certain other ingredients.

My mom and I were talking about both of us wanting to do our trees primarily in home made decorations and with a very few exceptions, mine is this year (we have a few football team ornaments and a few the girls really like but other than that, everything else was bought off Etsy or made by us)

We have the main celebration with my family on Christmas eve, his on Christmas day and ours Christmas morning with a few gifts on Christmas eve.

Over the years, I’ve slowly started incorporating some Yule rituals either privately or with my kids included and we’ll do that at home instead of celebrating Christmas in our home- since a lot of Yule traditions overlap with Christmas.

What types of traditions do you have with your kids?