Holiday Traditions

For those of you that read my post yesterday, I appreciate it;)

I'm in a much better mood today...the sun is shining, I listened to my 4 year old sing Christmas Songs along with the radio, my pain is less and my 5 year old said that she wanted to give her Daddy a "Big Hug" for Christmas.  I love the holidays and it got me to thinking about traditions that people do for the Holiday Season.  I thought I would share what we do. 

Growing up, I lived very close to my grandparents so we always spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with them but now we live 3 hours from my parents/grandparents and 6 hours from my husband's parents so we as a family (my husband, 2 children and myself) had to start a new tradition as we don't want to travel on Christmas with two young kids and it is a bit too far for my grandparents to travel for a day. 

On Christmas Eve, we usually go to mass and then come home and eat a big Polish dinner.  I'm Polish and it is important for me to keep our heritage going with the children.  After dinner, we make gingerbread houses and then the kids get to open a present from us (always PJs) and then some presents from their grandparents which were brought down earlier in the year.  After some playing with presents, we put out cookies, milk and carrots for Santa and the reindeers.  The other thing that we do and the kids seem to love the most is that we track Santa using NORADS site.  The link to it is http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html and it is awesome as it shows Santa moving around the world.

Christmas morning, the kids wake up and see what Santa has brought and then after that we have a nice Irish breakfast and they get to open the rest of their presents.  We spend the day in our PJs and dinner is usually some Italian food from a great restaurant down the street.

I really love the tradition that our family has formed and even though the first year without my extended family was a bit tough for me I've come to realize that life is all that you make of it.  If I go into it with a great attitude then it will be a great day.  Usually having this type of attitude can even rub off on people, it tends to rub off on my kids;)