Holiday Traditions

Welcome to Day Seven of the 12 Days of Christmas!  I have loved getting to celebrate Christmas with all of you this month!

If you ask my family, they’ll tell you…I love traditions!  Like, I’m obsessed with them!  There are many holiday traditions that I enjoy but when it came down to picking my favorite tradition, there wasn’t even a question as to my favorite tradition…making gingerbread houses!  And since this post is all about sharing traditions from over the years, I’m sharing pictures from the archives of my life (specifically 2008) even though they aren’t styled all pretty and I definitely didn’t take them with a blog post in mind 😉

Every year when I was younger we would make gingerbread houses with my grandma.  Some years my cousins and I would all do it together and some years she would let each of her grandkids have their own day to make a house.  Either way there was always a LOT of candy and my grandma had endless patience when it came to carefully constructing a gingerbread house.  We would “glue” each piece of the house together with icing and then she would sit with us and wait and wait and wait for those pieces to be firmly stuck before moving to the next piece.  Even when we wanted to hurry up and get to the decorating part, she’d make us slow down and wait…it’s actually a good lesson for life, not just gingerbread houses.

My grandma also firmly believed that it was all about the process and not the finished product so not matter how ridiculous our decorating ideas were each year, and we got very creative sometimes, she would let us decorate our gingerbread house any way we wanted!

My grandma passed away almost three years ago but the tradition lives on and this weekend our whole family will again be making gingerbread houses 🙂  If you want to see the finished results, I’ll post pictures on Instagram so go and check it out there!

What holiday traditions do you celebrate each year?

If you’re looking for more ideas and inspiration of holiday traditions, go check out these other 12 Days of Christmas bloggers…

Amee from Inspired Housewife | Ana from Mommy’s Bundle | Joanna from Motherhood and Merlot | Lauren from Twin Tested, Pin Approved | Phyllis from Verified Mom

And if you haven’t already done so, go and enter the $300 gift card giveaway!