 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be all about our holiday traditions. Now, I don't know about you guys, but for us, we never sat out to be like, these are going to be our holiday traditions. This is what we're going to do every year. It's just things that just kind of happened. I was even talking to my mom about it and there's something that I did that was part of my childhood that we started doing when Emily was born. And it was never even at that point that I realized it was a tradition. It was just something I enjoyed that I wanted to share with my daughter. And so I think it's kind of funny looking back now, like when I started trying to write out the things that we have that are traditions that you don't even realize that you're making traditions when you're making them. It's just memories, it's just fun times. And eventually they become something you do every year and one day you're going to realize that they're traditions. And that's kind of where I'm at right now. It's like, okay, these are the things we've done. Year after year, they've become staples in our holiday season and our family. And I just wanted to share them with you guys. Maybe you're looking to add something to yours or maybe it's just a way for me to remember what our traditions are because I can look back on this in years. But either way, I'm going to share with you guys today. The first tradition that we have, it's kind of was like a smorgasbord of a few different things. So when I was a kid, Santa would leave kind of a box out for us Christmas Eve night and it had pajamas and like just kind of some knick-knack stuff, like maybe a new Christmas mug and things like that. And we loved it. But as I became a mother and we started doing it, while I loved the idea of having her in great pajamas for Christmas, I hated the idea that she was only wearing these new pajamas for one day. So I tried to kind of find a way to make it still that same thing, but a little bit different. And that's when I found my girl from Abbey's. Pajama boxes is what she calls them and I will link to her video over here. And she gets her kids a box kind of at the beginning of the Christmas season that has all of this stuff in it. And so that is something that we have been doing for the past four or five years now, three to four years, it's been a while. And so on the night that we decorate our Christmas tree, when the Christmas tree is going to be up or when we take it out, we give Emily a gift. And in that gift box is a lot of different things. I'm gonna show you guys this year's, but normally it's just kind of like pajamas and a knick-knack, just kind of some things that help like kick off the Christmas season. So inside the box this year, we have the Grinch Grow Your Heart card game, the Book Top Elf, a Christmas tree poppet. I'm mildly obsessed with these and so is she. So I thought it would be kind of fun to have one of these. A Grinch Tervis, I'm also mildly obsessed with the Buffalo plaid. So she got some Buffalo plaid pajamas and matching socks. And then a Countdown to Christmas. This is from us born, it's 24 activities, one for each day of Advent. So they're kind of like craftivities, but I thought it would be fun things that she could do herself. Okay, so that is our pajama box. That's what we call our Christmas tree gift. So it's kind of like the first gift that we give. Then the other things that we do include, at the beginning of the season, we each pick some sort of charitable act or donation or something that we wanna do. We call it our giving back before we get. That's just kind of what it became. And we've done it since Emily was a baby. Like before she could even pick what she wanted to do, we were still doing it. And we've done multiple different things and we each pick something. So Kevin typically picks wounded warriors. Normally we make a stocking, a piece. So we normally give them three stockings full of stuff to send to vets or to warriors. He typically always picks something military based. He was an Air Force and so that's like really near and dear to his heart. And so he does that quite frequently. Over the years, I have done many different things. My favorite donation that I ever did, and this is so sad, you guys, was to a nursing home. That year my grandmother had fallen and broken her hip and she was staying in a nursing home and just going to visit her really kind of opened my eyes. And I called my local nursing home and asked him, hey, what can I give them? And the lady at the phone told me that their greatest gift would be soap, which you guys, I'm gonna try not to get choked up even saying it because it broke my heart. That would be something they would treasure the most. And so she's like, you could literally just get by 10 different creamy body soaps and we could give them out Christmas to you 10 different residents. And I was like, no, no, how many residents do you have? And I don't remember what the number was. I think it was close to like 85 or 90. And granted, it was only Dollar Tree soap because that's all we could afford. But we bought body wash, not bar soap, for every resident in the nursing home. That was what I did. That was by far the best one that I've ever done. It meant the most to me. But we choose different things every year. Emily typically always does something animal-based. She has donated food to animal shelters. She has taken blankets, done a blanket drive. We each always do that though. And the monetary part of it has changed over the year. Sometimes we've done different prices. Sometimes we've been able to afford more. Sometimes we can only afford it a little bit. But for as long as I can remember, we each choose basically our way of giving back. And then we do each of those things as a family. So that is probably our favorite tradition of them all, honestly. And I love that it's something that Emily has grown up with and is going to continue to grow up with. So I know this isn't gonna be everybody's favorite tradition and that's okay. We can agree to disagree. But Emily, with the exception of last year, has gone to see Santa every single Christmas. And we prefer the Santa at Bass Pro Shop. There's a Bass Pro Shop about an hour and a half away from us. And I don't even know that their Santa is better. It may be that Kevin has convinced me that their Santa is better because he gets to walk around Bass Pro Shop now that I'm thinking about it. But either way, that has just kind of become our thing. We leave the house on one day. We just pick a day and we're like, okay, this is the day we're gonna go see Santa towards the beginning of the holiday season. And we go down to Bass Pro Shop. We go get dinner and then we go meet Santa at Bass Pro. They give away a free picture, which is fantastic. And you can still take pictures with your phone as well. Now we didn't do it last year because there was plexiglass between the kids and Santa. And I asked Emily before we went and she was not interested in not being able to kind of have that connection with him. So that last year, we didn't do it. We did like a parade where you could drive by and see Santa instead. But we have already called. There is no plexiglass this year. There is still a bench. You don't sit on Santa's lap, which she's actually even more excited about not having to sit on his lap. But there is no plexiglass. So she's super excited to do that again this year. Now during the holiday season, there are a few things that we do which is kind of a whenever we can fit them in. And those things include looking at lights. I remember that being like the biggest thing in my family growing up and we would drive around and we would just scream lights on my side, lights on my side. And everybody would like look to that side. I'm surprised the car didn't tip over when everybody leaned. But that was one of my favorite things. So we have two different like physical drive-through lights shows that we go to. One is Night of Lights in St. Augustine, which is fantastic. It's phenomenal. And then the other is the magic of lights which are, well it's not even local, it's an hour away. But our racetrack does. So you can drive around the racetrack and see the lights. And then we also will just randomly go looking at lights. So we will just be like, hey, let's go look at lights tonight. We'll just get in the car and drive around looking at Christmas lights. So that's something we kind of do like throughout the whole season. We also make it a point to do a nativity scene at some time during the Christmas season. It depends on kind of how all of the Christmas festivities with our families work out. Last year we did a drive-through nativity that was phenomenal. And we're kind of debating on whether we want to go back to the one we were doing before that's a walk-through or if we want to do the drive-through again. I'm not sure, but the drive-through one last year considering all the things that were going on, they knocked it out of the park. It was the coolest. But that is something that we do every year some former fashion of a nativity scene. And that's something that we will continue to do. We also really, really love to bake together. So Emily's favorite is what she calls Kisses Cookies which is just peanut butter cookies with kisses in the center. Kind of tastes like a Reese's peanut butter cup. But those are her favorite because even when she was like a baby, baby, at the very least she could unwrap the kisses. So even when she had really no business being in the kitchen and she was probably only, I don't know, 18 months old, maybe she could still unwrap the kisses to be part of our Christmas baking. And it's normally something that either me and her do or a lot of times we'll have my mom over and we all do it together. And it's just really, really fun. We bake a large number of cookies, like dozens and dozens of cookies. I don't even know why anymore. We've just done it forever. Sometimes we'll end up with cookies that I don't even know what we're gonna do with because we have so many that are coming out of our ears. But we love to bake. So we just spend a whole day doing nothing but Christmas cookie baking. And we give them to friends and families and our postman and our UPS driver and anybody we run into over the next week after we've baked cookies. It's just something we love doing so we always make a point to do it. And then the most recent thing that has kind of been added to our traditions, I guess, is something that this is, I think only our third year doing it, but we've really come to love it, is during the holiday season when Emily was little bitty, we would do a movie night, like once a week. I mean, we watch Christmas movies nonstop in our house. So I don't think we're only watching them once a week, but we would have like an intentional movie night. Like I remember when she was like three, we had my dad and stepmom over and we watched Elf and we all wore Elf hats and we ate spaghetti for dinner just to make it fun, right? Because it was a blast to do it. And so we did that once a week for as long as I can remember. And now for the past two years, the movies that I found that we loved the most, the ones that we kept returning to over and over and over the ones that we were like, okay, these are the ones that are gonna be our Friday night movie nights or our weekly movie nights, happen to all have some sort of picture book with them. So it has become a book and movie night now over the past two years. And I shared more about that in our holiday homeschool plans if you wanna check that out here. But basically those are the Polar Express, how the Grinch stole Christmas, Home Alone one and two, Elf and a Christmas Carol. So that has kind of become our Friday night thing is that we after dinner, read the picture book together as a family. We just kind of snuggle up on the couch under a blanket and we take turns reading or maybe we'll read different character parts or just depends on what mood we're in, but we just enjoy reading this picture book together. And then we watch our favorite version of the movie or multiple versions of the movie depending on the mood we're in. Like normally when we do the Grinch, we do the animated and the live action. Elf, obviously we just watch Elf Home Alone, we watch Home Alone one and two. The Christmas Carol, typically we watch the Disney Christmas Carol because that's the one Emily likes the most. And just kind of like that Polar Express, we always save Polar Express for the very, very last week right before Christmas so that it's like our Christmas Eve movie. But it's just become a really great way to make sure that we're staying connected as a family, make sure that we're kind of like ending our week on a note that's like, hey, let's come together, let's quiet down, let's cozy up. I hope you enjoyed hearing a little bit more about our family's holiday traditions. And now I would love to hear more about yours. So please tell me in the comments, what are some of the things that your family does over the holidays?