Our Holiday Traditions 2021
OUTFIT DETAILS ARE LINKED HERE!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year again as the holiday season is officially upon us. While things continue to look and feel a lot different this year, I think maintaining some traditions will likely be good for the soul in whatever way you can.
It has indeed been a challenging year in so many ways, and for me, it’s the perfect time to reflect and count my blessings. Within the last week, we’ve experienced the tragic loss of my maternal uncle, so we’ll be navigating the holidays with the new normal of him being gone. I am sending love and peace to those who have also experienced loss and are struggling through the holiday. Despite our grief, I will continue to practice my attitude of gratitude, as I believe there’s always something to be grateful for.
Today I thought it would be fun to share my holiday traditions with BK. This is the 8th holiday season that we will be spending together and our first in the new home that we moved into earlier this fall. I love giving back to my family and friends, my community, and those during hard times. It feels good doing what I can to contribute to making those around me feel extra loved and appreciated.
OUTFIT DETAILS ARE LINKED HERE!
our holiday season traditions:
The weekend after Thanksgiving we typically decorate the house, it was fun decorating the new house this year and reconfiguring what we had in the new space. See how our tree turned out here, you can shop some of the items that we used to decorate the tree here and a lot of our holiday decor here.
Each year we take photos for our holiday card, shown above! You can see previous years here, here and here. It took us a few tries and outfit changes to get the final look, grateful to my boys who went along with In case you missed it, I shared some photo session outfit inspiration and tips for feeling confident in photos too.
After thanksgiving, I make Brian watch at least one holiday movie a week with me. Brian’s all-time favorite is Home Alone II, mine always was A Christmas Story but now I’m not so sure… We recently watched A Bad Mom’s Christmas, which is not necessarily a wholesome film by any stretch of the imagination, it’s rated R. We certainly had a few laughs though. We also enjoyed watching Four Christmases and 8-Bit Christmas.
Every December or so, we make my great-grandmother’s recipe for Sunday sauce and meatballs. She called it “gravy” with her thick Brooklyn, NY accent. The recipe makes a HUGE batch, so we end up freezing it into smaller containers, giving some away to family, then enjoying the rest at a later date. It is really great in lasagna, too. I have the process saved to my IG highlights, and I am be open to putting the recipe in a blog post if you’re interested… I hope great-grandma wouldn’t mind!
We usually leave the holiday baking to my dad, it’s not the holidays without his famous cutout cookies. He was kind enough to share the recipe here! I’ve also shared a bunch of other fun and festive recipes on the blog recently.
Since Brian and I first started dating, I started the fun tradition of giving each other an ornament to open up on Christmas morning. The idea was to get an ornament that represented a highlight of the previous year and/or our relationship. We somehow have turned it into a competition on who will find the best ornament. This has made decorating the tree really sentimental and sweet! We like reminiscing on all of our years and then look forward to the years to come.
On Christmas morning, I make a quiche, a tradition passed on from my mom. My dad delivers a cinnamon Danish from a local bakery that we enjoy with our morning coffee. This year we’ll be hosting Christmas Day for the first time, looking forward to that.
For New Year’s Eve, I always wear red underwear! As the legend goes, this tradition brings good luck in love in the new year; yellow underwear brings good fortune and prosperity; green underwear brings better luck than the previous year; blue underwear brings good health. I may try a new color this year. What color will you wear? Check out my post from this year.
For the past several years, we’ve anonymously “adopted” families and have provided everything on their wish lists. I love imagining their faces on Christmas morning. It’s definitely my all time favorite thing to do each year. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do it this year but we were able to make a few donations to our favorite organizations.
And lastly, it’s not the holiday season until Walter get’s dressed up in his Santa hat! He also has quite the holiday sweater and bowtie collection which he enjoys rotating throughout the colder months. See some of his favorites here!
Do you have any favorite holiday traditions that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear yours below. Thanks for reading! XX CMK