MUST WATCH IF YOU HAVE KIDS | Christmas Traditions With Kids🎄

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. I will be sharing with you guys my personal favorite traditions that I do with my kids, as well as maybe give you a couple of tips that I have found that has helped me with my kids during the Christmas season, just some fun things that we like to do as a family or things that we have found to do with our kids over the last couple of years. So we have twin six-year-olds. We also have a one-and-a-half-year-old son, all boys. So we have had a lot of fun the past couple of years during the holiday season. I feel like when you have kids, it just makes everything that much more special. So this video is only going to be about things to do with kids. I was going to put this in another video where I wanted to go through like traditions, my personal favorites like movies and Christmas music, like all of those things, but I feel like this one in particular needs to be separate because people that maybe have kids that might be searching for a video like this, I wasn't sure what I would title it if it was kind of like all of that into one. So I will have that in another video coming up here pretty soon. The first two I'm gonna share with you guys are really more to keep you as the mom sane during the holiday season. So the first one is Santa's phone number. I don't know if you knew this, but there is a phone number where you can call Santa Claus and leave him a voice message. I have had to use this about 10 times this last week. Anytime my kids are starting to act at all out of hand, I pick up my phone and I tell them I'm calling Santa Claus and I put it on speaker phone and they can hear Santa's voice and immediately they act like little angels. This is really helpful for me during the holiday season, but you can use this any time of year. You know, Santa's watching you all the time. So keep this phone number saved as Santa Claus in your phone. Call him anytime. You can leave a voice message. Let him know if your kids are being naughty that day or if they're being really good. Either way, I feel like it's a win-win and it's fun. Like when the kids are being really good, we'll call him. I let each of my kids leave their own personal voice message to Santa Claus. So this is really good for both the kids and for you. This next one is also just kind of a tip. And this is something I do throughout the entire year. So I keep a list of my phone in the notes section as Christmas list. I have everybody's names in my family. And as I think of something that they might like, I will put it down in those notes because I will forget. I have like the worst memory ever. You know, if I see something that I'm like, they would love that. I usually forget it, like by the next day. So I always have this note in my phone. If your kids are older, maybe have your Christmas list listed as like laundry list because if they are on your phone and they see that and it says Christmas list, they'd obviously probably open it up and check it out. But if it says something about laundry or something else that's super boring, they're not gonna go through it and they're not gonna read it. So that's another tip. This has really just helped me personally keep track of everything, not just for my kids, but everyone else in my family. So like if I see something for my mom, like let's say in May or June, and I'm like, well, her birthday's already passed. This is something I could get for her for Christmas. I will write it down in that note. A tradition that we like to do is I will wrap 24 of our Christmas books and I don't buy new ones every year. Otherwise you'd be spending way too much money on books, but I will just wrap all of the Christmas books that we have. So 24 of them and we read a different one every single night. So I keep it in a container and the boys every night will grab one and that's the story that we will read as a family that night. So that's been a really fun tradition. Another one is to have some kind of advent or a Christmas chain. We like to do Christmas chains. That's something that I did as a kid growing up. But another thing that we have is we have this mouse book. This is a tradition that's carried on from me as a kid and I think that because of that, like because this was a tradition for me, it's more special. So I grew up with this cute little mouse book. Each day that there's a little book in there, we would read it and we'd hang the little ornament on the tree. So I had carried this on with my kids. So if you had something you did as a kid that you loved or looked forward to, I would suggest obviously carrying that on with your kids as well. This is another one of my personal favorites. So in our town, I live in Utah, we have something called the Heber Creeper and it's a train where you go on it, you take your kids and someone reads the Polar Express book, they serve hot chocolate, they make you feel like you are on the actual Polar Express. But it is so expensive, like hundreds of dollars and it sells out really fast. So what we have been doing as a family is we also have something called the Front Runner and that's something that we do as a family every year because it's super inexpensive, like a couple of dollars. And we have made our own family tradition where I will bring the Polar Express book, we get hot chocolate before we go, we get onto the train and then we ride it for a few stops or sometimes we will ride it to a destination, get off, do something fun, get back on and ride the train some more. Because kids love to ride trains anyway but it's so fun because one of us will read the Polar Express while we're drinking the hot chocolate. So we've kind of just made this our own tradition. And this is something that anybody could do, like if you have any kind of, even a bus, you know, you could be really creative with this one. But this is something that we look forward to every single year. I think it's fun to go when there's Christmas lights out because that's something that we like to do is we'll look out the window and try to spot all the different Christmas lights. So that's another fun one I wanted to share with you guys. Something we do at Thanksgiving, on Thanksgiving after we've eaten, our whole family, an extended family, we do the Nativity. I think it's very important to keep Christ at the center of Christmas and so there's a lot of things that we do as a family that I could share in another video specifically on how to keep Christ the center of Christmas. But this is just a really good way to kick off Christmas and I love that we do this as a family. We have all the kids dressing up as angels or shepherds or Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. Ezra was baby Jesus last year. I remember he is so big and Mary, our little cousin that was carrying him, could barely hold him so she's walking him with him and he's like the same size as her. It was so funny. But anyway, this is just a really fun tradition. If you don't do this, this is something that I would definitely recommend doing. Elf on a shelf is probably a very obvious one. When I was growing up, my mom did something very similar as elf on a shelf. We had this big elf, it was called Papa Elf, and she would do something similar that elf on a shelf does. You know, it's like this surprise every morning. My mom was like, I should have invented elf on a shelf. Like this was totally something that I had thought of years before. So that's always kind of like an inside joke in our family. But that's really a fun one. It keeps the whole month of December exciting and makes your kids really excited when they wake up. You do not have to spend money. I see all over the place people going like all out and like have these elaborate gifts every single morning. You do not need to do that. If you just look on Pinterest for different ideas or free elf on a shelf ideas, you could come up with tons of them so you never have to spend any extra money. My kids just look forward to finding him every morning. They don't expect a gift or a treat every single day. So they're just excited to see where did he show up. And it's also a very good thing if your kids are acting naughty, you know, elf on the shelf will keep them accountable since he goes and visits Santa Claus every single night. Something else that we love to do, me and my husband will take the boys to like Target or Walmart or any other kind of, you know, when Toys R Us was around, Toys R Us, and we'll have them hold presents that they want. And we'll take a picture of them holding the present. This is good for two different reasons. Number one, we send this to Santa Claus, but it also helps us remember which kid wanted what and to have a visual is really helpful, but it's also so fun for them. They get this experience of like, I get to show you guys everything that I want, but they know they don't get to take those presents home with them. This is something that they look forward to probably more than anything that we do is we wanna go take those pictures of us holding those presents for Santa Claus. Moving on to a couple of my personal favorites, I wanted to save these ones for the end. One of them is this Santa photo app. I do this every single year. I catch Santa in our living room. I will show you guys a picture of what I mean, and I will have the app linked below in the description box. So click that arrow below to the description box under the video, and I will have everything linked below so you guys can create your own. So basically what you do, you take a picture of your living room. You'll wanna take this picture on Christmas Eve as Santa Claus is putting the presents out. And then you can put any kind of Santa that you want. I'm trying to be quiet because I think one of my kids is listening in the room. Simon, Cohen, I'm like, I probably better be quiet about this because they love these pictures. Okay, so you just slide over the Santa Claus that you want. They're transparent backgrounds, so you can just pick whatever one. You can adjust the size of it. It's really, really cool, and this is something that we do every single year. Something else that we like to do is we have a snowman day. We dedicate an entire day to snowmen, and we'll start by having breakfast. We'll make snowman pancakes. You know what? I've never vlogged this, and I've never taken a picture of it, so I'm just gonna pull up a different photo to give you guys an example of something cute that you could do for your snowman breakfast. And then we go out, we play in the snow all day. If you do not have snow, you can totally still do this, but just obviously not with the snow. And then we watch Frosty the Snowman. We watch Frosty the Snowman, and Frosty the Snowman returns. So we just dedicate one entire day to snowmen, and that has just been such a fun tradition. These last two are probably the very best ones for your kids that they will get the most excited about. The first one is on Christmas Eve, we track where Santa is headed. I will have the link below where you can actually go to the website, and it'll show you where Santa is stopped at right then. Every five minutes on Christmas Eve, they're like, can we pull up that website and see where Santa Claus is? And so that's been a really, really, really fun website to check out. Again, I will have that linked below in the description box. And the very last one I wanted to share with you is the portable North Pole app. This by far is our favorite. We use it all throughout the year. And this is just a whole bunch of different videos. They do cost money. Some of them are free, but I think the unlimited pass is $11, and you can make as many videos as you want with that pass for an entire year. So I make videos at their birthdays, obviously on Christmas Eve. I make it at the first of December. I just pick a video, and you get to insert clips of your kid. The Santa Claus will say your child's name, so he'll say, hi, Simon, it's so good to see you. I know you've been really good this year. I know these are some gifts that you want, and the pictures of gifts that they want will pop up. Someone's here to see me? Oh, hello, Simon. Huh? You're catching me in the middle of a reading session, my dear boy. It's so good to see you with the help of my P.S. Oh my goodness. I need to talk to you about a few things. Luna, would you get his big book for me, please? I keep a book about every child in the world. Look at that. It's in this book that the elves make and those are all the things you do, all the things that interest you. For example, I see here there's a gift you've been hoping for. Oh, Legos! What kind of Legos? Oh my goodness. He will show a picture of their house, so you just insert a couple of pictures, like a picture of your family, a picture of your house, so he'll say, I know this is your address, this is where you live, I'm so excited to come and visit you this Christmas. He'll take them on a tour of his workshop. It is the coolest thing I've ever seen, and every year, my kids freak out. I've done it the past three years and it never fails to excite them. Every time they get that personalized video, they are just awestruck. They can't believe Santa Claus is calling them by name, that he knows the gifts that they want, that he knows where they live, that he knows what they've been doing. It is the coolest thing ever, so this is definitely something that I would recommend for you guys with kids. All right, well I hope you guys enjoyed some of these ideas to do with your kids this holiday season. Again, I will be putting out another video here pretty soon of our entire family tradition, some of our favorite things we like to do, as well as our favorite movies we like to watch and our favorite Christmas songs and favorite goodies and treats to make and all of that fun stuff, so keep an eye out for that. Please also let me know what kind of videos you guys wanna see over the next month and a half. I don't wanna be making videos if you guys are not interested in watching them, so please let me know in the comments below. Also, if you guys have fun traditions you do with your kids or if there's something that I didn't mention that you love to do with your kids, please also leave that in the comments. I love to get different ideas from you guys, and I know other people reading the comments would love some input too, and we can all just kind of feed off each other, sharing different ideas, so thank you guys so much for watching. If you have not yet hit that red subscribe button, make sure you do that, as well as the bell to make sure you're always being notified when we upload a video. Thank you guys so much for watching, and we'll see you guys in the next video. Bye! ♪ Hey Santa, the city is covered in snow tonight ♪