Christmas Traditions

I absolutely love this time of year! I love having Christmas decorations around the house, buying presents for loved ones and spending time with family and friends! Since we have been married, Nick and I have tried to establish a few family traditions. As I'm sure most people do, we have brought some traditions with us from our families and started one or two of our own. I thought I would share a couple our traditions and how we are getting Kate in on them.

The first is our Christmas tree decorations. I think everyone has their own idea of how a Christmas tree should look...what type of ornaments, lights and other decorations should be on the tree. Nick grew up with gorgeous trees that were coordinated with matching ornaments that followed a theme and/or color scheme. My tree, while also gorgeous if I do say so myself, was a hodge podge of all types of ornaments that my mom received from her students as a teacher over the years, ornaments that my sisters and I made (yes, even those almost unrecognizable ones from Kindergarten) and ones that we were given over the years. When we were all living at home and decorating the tree there were so many ornaments you had to start on the inside of the tree next to the trunk and work your way out on the branches so that all of the ornaments would fit. Each of us had our own box of ornaments and by the time I left home and had my own tree it was full to the top with all of the ornaments that I had made and received over the years. Nick and I have brought this tradition into our family. We have all of my ornaments from my childhood, Nick's collector LSU ornaments (we get a new one each year) and we have added ornaments since we have been together--one with a dated picture the year we got engaged, one from St. Lucia where we went on our honeymoon, one from San Francisco where we went on our 1 year anniversary and last year we added a family ornament with a picture of our little family with our addition of Kate. We added ornaments from some of those that used to hang on Nick's trees growing up, mostly ones that his mom hand painted. We also started an ornament box for Kate last year and plan to add at least one ornament to her collection each year. It is a lot of fun to pull out the ornaments each year and remember where they came from and what was going on in our lives at the point in time that we added them to the collection.

As with most southern families food has also always been a big part of the holidays. There are a few things that I always remember being made around the holidays--cheese balls, chex mix and Christmas Fruit Cookies (aka Fruit Cake Cookies) just to name a few. This is yet another tradition that I have tried to bring into our family. The Christmas Fruit Cookies are the "biggie". For as long as I can remember, I remember these cookies being made to have on hand and give as gifts for Christmas. I also remember these as always being made with other family members...probably because they are some labor intensive cookies...but I also think as an excuse to spend some extra quality time during the holidays with the ones we love. It started with my Mammaw, my Mom's mom. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table chopping fruit and nuts into this big yellow tub for hours while she and my mom talked and all the regular hustle and bustle of the house went on around them. Then after my Mammaw passed away it became something that we did with my Granny, my Dad's mom. The first couple of years of marriage I was able to help out with the cookie baking as we would come in town around the holidays but once we moved to Baton Rouge I wasn't able to be there when they were being made and I decided that I would carry on the tradition and bake them for gifts. Well this year I decided that this was something that I was going to get Kate in on. Now of course there's not too much that she could do but she did help me mix the fruit and nuts. It must be done by hand so she was excited to get her hands into it. However she ended up mostly sampling the fruit. Then she helped sample some of the first ones that came out of the oven to make sure that they were turing out all right.

Well I hope you all are having as wonderful and blessed a holiday season as we are! And I hope you enjoy some pictures from our traditions.

Our Christmas Tree

Snowman ornament made by me I think in Kindergarten or the first grade, ornament from our honeymoon and one of the 12 Days of Christmas ornaments from my Mammaw's tree

One of Nick's LSU ornaments from his collection (we get a new one every year), an ornament hand painted by Nick's Mom and Kate's ornament from last year

My helper during the Christmas Fruit Cookie process

Cookies in process

And the finished product. Yum!

Santa stopped by our neighborhood while we were baking our cookies. He rode through the neighborhood posing for pictures and handing out candy to all of the children in the neighborhood

Kate was not a big fan of Santa...check out the look she's giving him. When he tried to hold her for a picture she grabbed onto me for dear life so the 3 of us got a picture. I know I look rough but remember that I had been baking all day