If you’ve followed here for awhile, you know that we hold traditions very loosely when it comes to holidays. We always want to give our family space to try new things, take into consideration the season of life we’re in, and decide from year to year and from holiday to holiday what works best for our family that year.
The one tradition we do always keep for Christmas is to make a December Bucket List. We’ve been doing this for a number of years and it always means that we have a memorable Christmas season focusing on doing the activities that we are all most excited about and want to prioritize that year.
This year, we had some new things on our Bucket List, including watching at least 5 Hallmark movies (my pick), going out for Hibachi (Silas’ pick), wearing matching jammies — we did this for our family Christmas celebration (Kaitlynn’s pick), going to the store and picking out special snacks and then having a family movie night (Kathrynne’s pick), Dollar Tree Stocking Stuffer annual tradition (everyone’s pick), All Day Family Christmas Celebration (everyone’s pick), and a few other things.
Jesse said one thing he thought would be fun to do would be to bake Christmas cookies together. We usually do some form of this, but we came up with a new twist on it this year. I had everyone in the family pick one kind of Christmas cookie or treat and then I made sure we had the ingredients on hand. The week before Christmas, we invited a friend over, turned on the Christmas music, and had a Christmas cookie Baking Night as a family.
Each person was in charge of making their chosen Christmas cookie and then we all worked together to clean up. After clean up, we had a rousing game of Phase 10. It was such a fun night and it was so easy to pull off! Plus, we tried a few new recipes and we enjoyed some old favorites, too.
Here were the cookies/treats we made:
Kierstyn enjoyed watching and eating a snack while we baked! 
What is your favorite kind of Christmas cookie or treat?
