My kids always got a homemade advent calendar. Now that they are in college, I pack them off with one during Thanksgiving break. They seem to find it worth grinning about.

Singing Silent Night by candlelight at the Christmas Eve service. Then coming home and singing Happy Birthday Jesus at home.

For Hanukkah, we light candles every night and give our kids one gift per night (usually one night is a family gift like tickets to a sporting event or theater and one night is a night that we sit down and decide on a charity to donate to). We make latkes and sufganiyot (jelly donuts). We usually go to at least one community candle lighting in the area and at least one friend's house for a Hanukkah party. I also have a pretty great Hanukkah playlist on Spotify and we re-watch all of our favorite Maccabeats and Six13 Hanukkah videos. And it's not Hanukkah without an annual viewing of the Rugrats Hanukkah episode.

On Christmas, we bake cookies to take to the fire station to thank the first responders who are working that day. And then we order Chinese food for dinner and watch a movie at home.

Holiday train exhibit
Drive through light
walk through lights
Baking cookies at home
Building Christmas themed Legos together
Santa on the fire truck (we make a night if this and have family over and make hot chocolate )

We are DC. Every year we do below:

Bake sugar cookies to give to family at xmas
Botanical garden train exhibit
Zoolights
Downtown holiday market and always get the yummy cocoa and mini-donuts

-Sugar Cookie decorating is fun.
-Decorate the Sunday after Thanksgiving
-Go look at the lights around town after Christmas Eve mass.
-Watch The Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation

We…
decorate the day after thanksgiving
Always make the same 3 Christmas candies (peppermint bark, buckeyes, and those silly pretzel/m&ms things)
Play the Christmas challenge starting december 1 (if you heat Wham’s “last Christmas”, you’re out)
Add an ornament to the tree each year with something memorable from DS’s year, and one from a family vacation
Hibachi on Christmas Eve
Presents are scattered around the house like an Easter egg hunt (this started in Covid when we knew Christmas morning would be small with just the three of us as a way to make the morning last a bit longer!)
Dogs each get a stuffed pickle for Christmas. They shred the wrapping paper and open their own gift.
Watch Napoleon Dynamite Christmas afternoon…I really have no idea how this developed, but we’ve done it for years and years

Watching macy’s parade
Cutting down tree
Baking lots of cookies
National Christmas tree
Angel tree at church
Driving to look at houses in pjs with cookies and hot chocolate
Evening mass followed by easy dinner (fondue or soup/sandwiches), watching a Christmas movie, kids exchanging presents with each other, and Night Before Christmas reading
Seeing professional lights: bull run, Watkins mills, or meadowlark

We have one gift each to open on Christmas eve that is always a new book, and the kids boxes also have matching Christmas PJs to wear that night plus a flavored hot chocolate packet.

Watching Muppet Christmas Carol (bonus if there's a theater showing it)

Ice skating after opening presents on Christmas morning.

Bake and decorate Christmas cookies
Living nativity centenary church
Watch Christmas movies together
Make ornaments for the grandparents
Visit National Christmas Tree

We do the above every year.

Some years, we also include:
Nutcracker in DC
Bull Run Lights
Botanic Gardens train display.

^^ we've had them for at least 25 years, and definitely didn't spend that much, but that's what turned up when I googled

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are jewish and when the extended family gets together for Hanukah, after the candle lighting and gift-opening all the cousins pile in a couple of cars and some uncles drive the kids around to see Christmas lights.

They make glasses that refract all the lights into stars of david, if you are a family who would find that entertaining. (My grandmother loved them.)

We have those glasses - fun to look at the lit up Christmas tree with them on (interfaith marriage, we celebrate Chanukah and Christmas).

For Chanukah, 8 gifts:
Something you want;
Something you need;
Something to wear;
Something to read;
One night from aunts and uncles;
One gift from grandparents (also a big-ish gift)
One big gift from us;
One night - charity - kids pick gifts for a child their age for our synagogue's toy drive (and we also donate gift cards)

For Christmas morning, they get stockings (from Santa/us) and gifts from aunts/uncles/grandparents from the Catholic side of the family. We also make monkey bread every Christmas morning

Can you link to these glasses?

Star of David 3D Glasses - www.holidayspecs.com https://share.google/zsTPGhwtoS9bhXrtC

Anonymous wrote:Cookies (held by stuffed animal) left for Santa with handwritten note from child
Baking cookies
Going to start one of making food to donate to food bank or taking them down to serve at one
Watching All the Charlie Brown holiday movies

Food banks don’t want homemade food. Take your kids to the store to pick things from the Food Bank’s list.

And one day of service is performative so you can tell all your friends about your good deeds.