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It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and it’s my favorite day of the year: Christmas Decorating Day (CDD for short)! Most people decorate for the holidays - so why not make it a special day that creates consistency and something your children look forward to every year? It’s our winter tradition, and it’s glorious. Check out our podcast episode 65 for more about winter traditions.

Here’s what we do for CDD:

1. Protect the Day

   No-one and nothing comes between our family and our Christmas Decorating Day. We protect that day as our special, intentional, family day that kicks off the Christmas season. It doesn’t always have to be the day after Thanksgiving, but usually, that’s an easy day to say “no” to people’s invites.

2. Prepare the Home

   If the house is messy, you will not feel like decorating it. You will want to clean it. The night before, plan a 20 minute pick-up and clean-up where every able person in the house cleans up for 20 minutes. With five people, that’s an equivalent of 1 hour and 40 minutes! If fall decorations are out, you will need to put those away the night before too. Another way to prepare the home is to ensure that all groceries needed for your favorite food are in the fridge and recipes are ready to go. Take all your chore needs out of the equation by preparing ahead of time.

3. Wear Christmas Clothes

   Nothing says CDD like wearing red and green with a Santa hat! I keep a supply of a half dozen Santa hats and a whole bunch of Christmas headbands and glasses. Most people of all ages have a red or green shirt they can wear if paraphernalia is not your thing. I also like to buy long Christmas socks and cut out the feet part and wear them as arm-warmers. To each her own.

4. Eat Favorite Meals

   Bacon is our absolute favorite, so we eat plenty of it at our CDD brunch. I decorate the table quickly with any Christmas accessible dishes, lit spiced candles, and some pom-pom garland. Cinnamon rolls, scrambled eggs, and pumpkin pancakes (Trader Joe’s are the best!) are also usually on the brunch menu. We make fresh-squeezed orange juice from our homegrown oranges the night before so that we have refreshingly cold, delicious juice in the morning. Lunch is typically left-over food from Thanksgiving plus some freshly baked Crescent Rolls for the kiddos. We cap the night off with either more left-overs, or pizza, and, of course, mulled wine for us parents.

5. Prioritize a Devotion Time

   For us, Christmas is truly the celebration about the coming of our Christ, the Savior of the world. He became man and inserted Himself into His own creation to provide justice, mercy, and grace to us. He is why we celebrate Christmas. So, at our brunch, we always have a devotion time led by the Spouse. We read scripture and discuss the Christmas story, the gospel, or the foreshadowing of Christ’s coming throughout the Old Testament. This year the Spouse picked a hymn from our Christmas hymns and history book (ours is out of print, but here is one like it), and we learned about Silent Night’s history, sang the hymn together, and then our nine-year-old played it on the ukulele for us. It was a special time seeing our children now join in on the worship in multiple ways.

6. Read a Christmas Book

   This year my children were so excited to re-read the Christmas version of my children’s favorite picture book series - about crayons! The Crayons’ Christmas is super cute and has multiple activities inside (including a board game). To fully appreciate the story, you may want to read the first two books ahead of time - The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home. Putting on a different voice for each crayon makes for a pretty giggly moment. Other Christmas books are listed below.

7. Play a Christmas Game or Craft

   We have a small supply of Christmas games, like the Santa Claus board game and a memory match game I made with Christmas pictures on Shutterfly. I typically buy Christmas themed crafts, stickers, and paper kits the week after Christmas at hobby or craft stores when they are 80% off. It’s nice to have a supply of craft kits to dig into the next year at a fraction of the cost.

8. Listen to Christmas Music

   We love to fill the air with Christmas music throughout the day. We don’t have a whole house speaker system, so we use a large bluetooth speaker from Costco (great for outdoor parties too!) so no matter where our children are in the house, they can hear the festive music.

9. Decorate

   It’s a decorating day, so of course we decorate! I have about a dozen+ storage bins of items for decorating the children’s rooms the way they like it (with plenty of light-up fun), ornaments bins, Christmas village bins, and Byers Carolers bin. We have pillows, blankets, garland, snow globes, and so much more. I like to get decorating completed in just one full day because, 1) It’s fun, 2) It’s efficient, and 3) You don’t have boxes or bins sitting out longer than the day.

10. Watch a Christmas Movie

    The best part of this activity is that the tree is lit, there’s a fire in the fireplace, the kids are drinking hot cocoa, and we are cuddled up together on the couch. Typically we watch Elf, but this year we watched Home Sweet Home Alone - which was hilarious. It’s a wonderful, peaceful end to our favorite day of the year.

Christmas Supplies:

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