Tradition Tag

Cousin Em tagged me to share some of our family traditions.  Since I'm at my Mom's, some of these are extended family traditions and some of them are pure WEHolman!

1. My Mom collects Santas.  Lots and lots of Santas by now.  Every year we help her decorate as soon as Thanksgiving is over and it's a several day process (see Tree trimming post below-that was something like day three!) 

2. We get jammies for Christmas Eve.  This started when we were young and Mom would make our jammies, and now we usually get jammie pants.  This year, just M and I get them in our little family because we're the ones who need them.  This is M last year is her new duds.
3. Mom also collects different Christmas plates. She wanted Christmas dishes but loved so many of them that it became a tradition to give her a place setting of different ones.  It's my job to set the holiday tables with my sister Grace's assistance, of course, and I won't lie, I get my favorite place setting every year because of it! (see bottom right place setting :)
4. Our Christmas Eve dinner is Crab! We always have shrimp tomato juice cocktail and shrimp cocktail and crab and artichokes.  We've strayed from the formula before but we always come back to the good stuff! yum!!!  (and no, this is not our dinner, this is someone else's I found on the web :)

5. She collects a lot of things. :)  Natvities are her other love.  She has nativities from all over the world now which is so cool. The next to bottom left one is from Bolivia from when her sister served a mission there with her family.  The Christus statue on the top right she brought home from a trip to Spain.
6. This is a WEHolman tradition.  We read a Christmas book every night for bedtime, that is when we remember!  We're getting better at it and M loves it!  We love reading to our girls and this is a great way that we talk about Christmas and try to refocus on Christ and the purpose of the season and less on Santa. 
Other favorite things: we get an ornament for our tree every year.  My parents used to get them for us but now it's something W and I do for our own tree. Usually it symbolizes a trip we went on or something that happened.  

Now that we have lots of grandkids, we're starting to act out the Nativity on Christmas Eve like we did when we were kids. I love it! 

I would love to hear your traditions! So tag yourself and let me know if you blog about what your family does for Christmas!!