Holiday Traditions: Creating your own family traditions

As a child Thanksgiving and the holiday season felt a bit lonely to me. We had a ton of relatives, but rarely traveled to visit them, and none made the trek to visit our small nuclear family (my mom, my dad, my sister, and I). I've always loved the holidays though, and in my nearly 15 years with my spouse we have come up with our own variations on traditions as our family has grown and changed.

This Thanksgiving I feel like we finally found the perfect balance of tradition, family time, and fun. We started with a family night out at the movies the night before Thanksgiving and ate out for dinner. It was nice to let the kids stay up a bit late, and really spend time together with all of us in one place (seems so rare!).

Thanksgiving day we weren't hosting dinner, so we had a lazy holiday breakfast, and the we spent some time cleaning up the house (a good way to start the weekend I think). Then we headed to Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's house where a fun (if rowdy) time was had by all 8 of our kids (yes, I said 8!). By the time we got home it was bedtime, so we talked to each of the kids about what they were thankful for which led to some giggles and some sweet moments. My husband and I ended Thanksgiving with a movie date night at home, a fun way to be thankful for our marriage.

Since I don't get up at 3am to shop, I've officially dubbed Black Friday as Pajama Day, so we stayed in our pjs and watched TV, played, and generally did nothing much. I highly recommend it.

The rest of the weekend was spent playing with the kids, decorating for Christmas (I love doing this on Thanksgiving weekend now-really gets me in the Christmas spirit), and having our own turkey dinner since we missed out on the leftovers.

I definitely want to repeat this tradition next year! It was so much fun getting the house ready for the holidays on the long holiday weekend.

I'm looking forward to Christmas this year and all the traditions we have around the Christmas season including shopping for Toys for Tots, hosting a treat party for friends, participating in some exchanges, and of course the gift shopping (my favorite part!).

What kind of traditions do you have around the holidays? Did you make your own traditions when you started your family or do you have long-standing family traditions?

I wrote this post as a proud member of the Yahoo! Motherboard, where we're sharing our favorite holiday ideas this month.