Grandma, Ornaments, a Pickle, an Elf and a box with little doors...

One of my favorites, from Nana to my son.

I love traditions! I'm not talking about the kind that bring stress or the statement "this is how we've always done it" but the kind that you and your kids look forward to every year.  My parents weren't really big into traditions and yet I have somehow become a person that loves the joy that comes with traditions.  I have started a few Christmas-time traditions for my family that everyone seems to love, Nana started one when my son was born and I have actually brought one from childhood that my parents may have unknowingly started.

Let's start with the one from my childhood. Opening the grandparents gift on Christmas Eve.  I think tradition started while I was in elementary school and it may have started as a way to shut us up, but it is one of my fondest childhood memories.  I think it was my mother who started allowing us to open the Grandparents' Jensen gift the night before Christmas and for us it made Christmas even that much more amazing and longer, in a good way.  So when I brought it to my family, it started with the gifts from Grandma Jensen and then after she passed, it became Nana's gift. Now when the kids were little Nana would send about a million gifts, so we made it the smallest gift, which ended up being a Hallmark Ornament.  This brings me to our next tradition...

Ornaments! The cool thing about the ornaments is that my children have at least one for every year of their life because Nana started giving each of my children an ornament on their very first Christmas.  Then I decided I needed to jump in on that dog pile and now our kids receive at least two ornaments every Christmas.  The greatest thing about this idea is that when each of my children move out, they will get to take along all of their ornaments. I love this idea because I remember the difficulty of buying my first tree and being so poor that I bought the cheapest "All-in-one" ornament set at Walmart and then filled in the blanks with handmade ones (and we are not talking about awesome handmade craft type, we are talking pathetic pieces of paper with coloring on them).

Well, I think the rest will have to wait until tomorrow...you see I have some coloring to do....(I promise to explain tomorrow).