Traditions

Next Saturday is Caitlyn's 5th Birthday party. In our house you get big birthday parties on your 1st birthday, 5th Birthday and 8th Birthday. Probably also 12th birthday, but we haven't gotten that far yet! I love to plan parties and all the things that go along with it. Buzz would say that I'm a bit obsessed.

Anyway it got me thinking about some of our other family traditions. When Buzz and I first got married we spoke about some of the traditions that we had in our different families that we wanted to continue in our own family. Here are just some of them. I'm sure that as we go through life new ones will start.

Christmas
Our Christmas season begins with a trip to the Credit union Christmas Pageant. Buzz gets up super early and saves us a good spot, then i come in a bit later with the kids. All the family is invited and we eat yummy donuts and watch the floats go past.

We always put our Christmas tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving. When we lived in America we always put it up on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but here in Australia it is usually the last weekend in November or the first one in December.

We always go into the city to go visit Santa. We like to go on a Friday night and have dinner and visit The Magic Cave and Santaland! We also usually stop in at the toy departments!

We also like to go a see The Brewery lights one night before Christmas.

On Christmas Eve day we bake cookies for Santa and drop off presents to our friends.

On Christmas Eve the kids are allowed to open one present. This present is always a new pair of pi's to wear that night!

On Christmas morning the kids aren't allowed to go out to the lounge room without us. They have to come to our bedroom where we read the Christmas story from the scriptures and have family prayer before Daddy goes to get the stockings from the lounge room. The kids then look through their stockings before we all head out to the lounge room.

Birthdays
Special, big birthday parties are on 1st, 5th, 8th and 12th Birthdays.

The birthday person gets to choose what we have for dinner on the night of their birthday. It can be something that I make or it can be take away.

We always open presents first thing in the morning.

On years that it's not a big birthday party we always have a family get together.

Other
Apart from Fast Sunday Buzz always cooks breakfast on Sunday mornings.

The kids have stories every night before bed.


That's all that I can think of right now. I'm sure that as we go through life I'll think of some more.

What are some of your family traditions? Was it hard when you were first married to merge your family traditions together?