The Tree Is Up – And Our NEW Christmas Tradition

I don’t know about you guys, but the Christmas tradition of putting up our tree every year is a bit of a mission.

The thing is, I always have this picture in my head.  The picture is always the same actually.  All of us are gathered around the lounge, singing Christmas carols off key while we assemble and decorate the tree.  It’s filled with laughter and joy – just like Christmas should be.

Except it’s NEVER like that.

The reality is that the kids lose interest halfway, the mince pies burn in the oven and by the time the tree is up I’m exhausted.  Instead of wanting to spend time with them, I’m counting the minutes until they are in bed.

BUT NOT THIS YEAR

There is nothing I enjoy more than making a little bit of a fuss about something.  You know, what I mean?  It just makes the whole occasion that much more special.  And so I realised that this is what I have been doing wrong over the last few years.  I wasn’t making a big enough deal about it.  In my head of course, but no one knows what goes on in there so it was unfair to expect my family to try understand that.  I need to clearly show them what I wanted to happen.  So…

This year I turned it up a notch.

A brand new Christmas Tradition

I made us a Christmas Traditions surprise box.  I filled it with all the things that I pictured when I thought of us having the best time.  Christmas jammies, special decorations, treats, mince pies, hot chocolate (but milkshakes because it’s hot here) and even some Christmas earrings.

Guys, this is so much harder to do in Cape Town, South Africa than you’d think.  Why we don’t have Christmas jammies in all of the big retail stores (which in translation means cheaper than getting them made because they aren’t going to get a hell of a lot of use out of them are they?  I found these at Cotton On – literally the only store that had anything like this and the earrings are from Lovilee).  Anyway.

The result?

Just look at these faces!!  Even Seth was surprised – he had no idea what I was doing.  Mission accomplished!

Once we’d changed, we got down to the serious business of decorating the tree.  Then, when the exhausting work was done, we had hot mince pies and watched Home Alone together under the twinkling lights from the tree.

And it didn’t go perfectly.  Far from it.

While we did manage to sing Christmas carols, we completely over decorated the bottom half of the tree with a million different colours.  While we laughed a lot, we also spilled our milkshakes down the front of our new white jammies.  While we had the special family watching movie moments, the movie we hired through Google Play kept skipping and so the words were never in sync with the actors.

But you know, it didn’t even matter.

I finally had my perfect Christmas tradition.