By: KitAy
The holidays are usually designated as family time. All of the cooking, exchanging of presents and travelling should bring all of you closer together. Traditions may develop early on as a result. But if you don’t have a family tradition for the holidays, there are several creative ideas for you to put your own twist on:
Acting out Plays
If you’ve got younger children, encourage them to write plays or skits that they can act out. In order to make it more fun, help them make funny costumes for the characters they’re going to play. You can even participate and play one of the characters. Rehearse with your children, but don’t put too much pressure on them. Remember this is just for fun.
After the skit is over reward your children with their favorite treat or a dessert. Talk about what you liked about the play. Ask them questions. This will show your child you’re interested in their activities and spending quality family time with them.
Playing Games
Board games are a great holiday tradition. You may want to play a board game from your childhood. Or you may want to try a new board game.
If you have a gaming system you can play video games with your child. Or you can play games with them outside. Football and hockey are two sports that you can play outdoors in cold weather. After you finish, you can go inside and warm up with smores and hot cocoa.
Watching Movies
There are a few movies that only air during the holiday seasons. You may want to watch those with your family. Or you can take them out to the movie theater to see a movie that they’re excited about.
Make it an event. Take them out to eat or make a big breakfast. When you’re at the movie theater, you can buy snacks. If you find it’s too expensive, try catching a matinee and splitting the cost with someone. Or stay at home, rent movies and make your own snacks.
Sharing Memories & Stories
If you have good memories or stories to share from your childhood or even the previous year, you can make that into a family tradition. Sit around and have each one of them tell a story about what impacted them that year, what they learned, and how they plan to better themselves in the future.
Holiday traditions can evolve as your family gets older. As long as you have them, your family will look forward to the holiday season.
I live in a small Georgia town that you most likely have never heard of and I LOVE it! My house is more than full as I am a single mother of four & caregiver to my aging mother and uncle. Lover of all things Outlander. Goes to the beat of her own drum woman.
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Traditions are something I really need to start to do with my kids, I had always depended on my great grandparents and grandparents for the Ukranian traditions I so loved and their stories, but sadly they’re gone. I find myself just doing the basic celebrations. We do watch A Christmas Story & Christmas Vacation while we cook and open gifts every year but I need to do more. i want to tell them about their wonderful family and break out the board games again-Thank you and have a great Holiday season!
So great that you mentioned acting out plays! When I was a kid, I was one of the older cousins who recruited (forced) the younger ones to do plays. I’d spend the days before writing the plays–some based on the Bible story, others based on popular Christmas tales. What fun! I haven’t thought of that in ages. Maybe it’s time to encourage my oldest grand-daughter.
Board games were always a holiday tradition in our house; we must have had at least 20 of them – and puzzles too. Now that mine are grown we’ve let that tradition go …it would be fun to play as grownups I think …
Love the playing out a skit idea. Our tradition is usually watching holiday movies and playing board games
Ours has always been playing cards- the grownups would always start betting pennies and getting louder and louder- it was actually pretty funny! We also watched the traditional movies and years ago for Christmas we went carolling,
Traditions are a great thing that leave you with a lifetime of memories.
I fondly recall ours.
I´m gonna try some new game with my family on x-mas