In today’s post I’ll share our family’s little Christmas Eve tradition! It’s particularly 2020-appropriate and I thought some other people might appreciate this idea as well. Here’s the Christmas Eve Box tradition!
So here’s the thing: I don’t really have any great photos for this post other than this one of me wrapping a random gift, because I’ve never really thought to share this before, but I really wanted to share this Christmas Eve box tradition here today because it’s one idea that has served our family very well over the past few years. Of course, this year, most families will be staying home and spending Christmas with just their immediate family and that can feel a little underwhelming if your usual tradition is to get together with a lot of people and have a big blow-out party. We used to have a party that one family member hosted on Christmas Eve that we used to go to and it created kind of a built-in festive activity for us for that night, but when they decided to stop hosting it, we found ourselves without something special to do. So we started the Christmas Eve Box tradition!
The Christmas Eve Box Tradition for Families Who Spend Christmas Eve at Home
So here’s what it is. You might find that this sounds like just the thing to bring a little Christmas magic to a Christmas Eve at home that feels a little ho-hum. We did! 🙂
If you’re the box-preparer, you of course miss out on the mystery and excitement about what is in the box, but you get to choose what’s in the box, so it’s a fair trade-off.
Basically, you gather up a whole bunch of fun things for the family to enjoy together when you open the box on Christmas Eve. We’ve typically gone out to dinner at a restaurant and then have come back home to open the box, but this year we’ll just do some fun take-out and maybe a fancy table-setting.
The types of things you include in the box are really up to you, but I usually include a few different board games, a whole bunch of fun snacks, some Christmas pyjamas and things like that. You could assemble everything you need for a Christmas movie night and that might be a fun theme. You could also make it fun really inexpensively by printing off some of the free printable Christmas games that you can find online and using those as your activities instead of store-bought games. Actually, those free games have been some of our favourites in past years and we still have some of the ones that are printed out on paper in our games cupboard. Christmas socks are a super fun, inexpensive addition that everyone will love, too.
If you include things like bags of chips, you’ll end up needing a pretty big box, so start looking for one right away if you’re planning on doing this idea. 🙂
After we open the box, we spend a couple of hours together snacking and playing games and then everyone’s usually tired and ready to go to sleep to get ready for the big day.
So that’s all there is to the Christmas Eve box tradition! Super simple, but super fun for everyone, no matter what their age. I also think this could work out really well for larger families or small families of two, so I just had to share this year.
Do you have a Christmas Eve tradition that you always follow that would be perfect for this year? I’d love to hear about it!
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.