How We Do Christmas (2025)

I know that Christmas is over, but I always enjoy hearing about other people’s family traditions so I thought I’d share a few of ours. Mostly I just want a spot for some of the pictures I took…

(Above: these string lights have nothing to do with Christmas and I’ll probably leave them up until I see green outside, but they have brought me so much cozy joy. There’s just something special about how a cozy glow paints all the mundane and ugly and cluttered and turns it into something magical. The work will be here tomorrow. Just rest, my child. In the stillness of the dark night, rest. A Savior is born and He carries your sorrows.)

I thought that maybe this year wouldn’t feel very Christmasy, since we’re in a furnished house that’s not our own, and everything (but a string of lights and a wooden tree made out of teak wood that I painted in Togo last year at a ladies’ party) is in storage.

But it actually was a very nice December. It started out with my birthday, which Ryan did a bang-up job celebrating. I had a few Christmas events to attend through my MomCo group…we got to go caroling in the bitter cold with some new friends…we got to take in a Christmas cantata.

But the best part for me was reading our collection of Christmas books with the children over and over, hearing them process things that they heard in Sunday school during the month, and talking with them about the true meaning of Christmas. They’re old enough now that they can really process quite a lot, and I’m loving it. (But they’re still young enough that a lot of things that come out of their mouths are pretty comical. I’m here for that too.)

CLICK HERE for a reel I did showcasing some of our favorite Christmas books. CLICK HERE for a list of them on Amazon.

They would get out our Christmas songbooks in the mornings and belt out “Away in a Manger” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in footed fleece pajamas at very low pitches and with hilariously revised lyrics – over, and over, and over. Even Rafi would find a songbook and carefully back up beside one of his siblings and do his best to imitate.

One of my favorite moments happened a day or two before Christmas. I was in the kitchen when I overheard:

Hadassah: Let’s talk about having a baby!

(Launches into a retelling of the Christmas story.)

Me: I guess that’s not going where I thought it was going.

(Thirty seconds later) Hadassah: And Mary pushed, and pushed, and pushed to get that baby out!

Yes, I suppose she did.

We made some cutout cookies. These cream cheese sugar cookies and these gingerbread cookies from Butternut Bakery. Both were delicious! The gingerbread remind me of my mom’s molasses crinkles, and neither dough was too hard to work with (as cutout cookies go, of course). I chilled them overnight and was generous with the flour when rolling, which helped.

I do think I would prefer a frosting without cream cheese though, so I’ll probably use Jenna’s decorator frosting next time instead.

Speaking of rolling, my rolling pin was in storage. The pizza roller was not doing the job, so a vinegar bottle carried the day.

My dear mom made cutout cookies with us every year as kids, and while we loved doing it I do remember it being a stress point. Cutout cookies were up there with pie crust in her mind. I have a fair amount of my mom in me, so I knew that cutout cookies and a floury mess combined with 3 small children was likely to raise my blood pressure, but I was determined to hide that from them as best I could and enjoy the process.

They actually did a wonderful job. I was very impressed. And I kept telling myself that it was no big deal if we had to re-roll the dough more than we should’ve had to, or if a candy cane broke, or if we ended up with mostly angels (who look pretty funny when baked).

I also let them help cut out and decorate the sugar cookie batch, but sent them to the basement to play while I rolled the batch of gingerbread cookies (and decorated those during naptime). Know your limits. 😉

All in all it was a good time, and we now have way too many cookies in the freezer. We’ve given away as many as we could, but sugar cookies are in overstock this time of year.

One project that took way too long but gave me much satisfaction was this cave for our nativity scene.

My nativity scene did not come with the traditional wooden stable, so I’ve been wanting to make some sort of shelter for Mary and the Christ Child for the past 7 years, when my parents gave me this nativity scene for my birthday the December after we got married.

After visiting Israel in 2019 on a study tour and realizing that a cave was more likely than a wooden stable in a culture where animals were either inside people’s homes or out in a cave (since wood was scarce), a cave it would be.

In my dreams it’s carved out of a piece of olive wood, but that’s pretty expensive. Someday when I have access to woodworking tools I might try my hand at carving something out of a branch of wood, but for now I improvised with expanding insulator foam and spray paint.

Joseph is too tall to fit inside, so he’s guarding the door. All of my little play animals that I usually display with the nativity are in storage. I’m just glad we managed to find the nativity set!

I found the string of lights at Aldi and used some really strong gorilla tape to fix them inside the cave.

We don’t have a good spot to display the nativity scene, so I set it up in my bedroom a few days before Christmas. The wise men used to be hunkered down across the room on the piano when we lived in Cleveland, but here we have no piano, so they’re relegated to the corner with a teakwood elephant from Togo instead of a camel.

Because the wise men were NOT present at the birth of Jesus. And neither are angels unassuming-looking women with two wings. IYKYK

One key part of the Thomas family Christmas Eve tradition is eggnog! Ours was an eggnog milkshake made of vanilla ice cream, brown sugar, raw eggs, nutmeg, and Mexican vanilla. You can find a THM remake HERE.

This year I made this soft serve eggnog ice cream for us to enjoy Christmas Eve.

Ryan was working the whole week (although shorter hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas), so for something special we went to see him at work, had lunch at the cafeteria, and dropped off some cookies.

For Christmas Eve we had our typical supper of charcuterie and eggnog.

We sang a bunch of Christmas carols, then read Mary’s and Zechariah’s prayers from Luke 1. I always find that to be a beautiful way to set the stage for the Luke 2 account of Christ’s birth.

We also watched the Christmas special produced by The Chosen a few years ago. We don’t really do any screen time, so when we watch something together as a family the children think that is a Very Special Occasion.

(Rafi always has to be grabbing, squeezing, and/or stroking my arms. He didn’t take a pacifier until just a few weeks ago – and still isn’t very attached to it – so this has always been his comfort mechanism when he’s tired.)

We give each child a book of their own with their name inside on Christmas Eve. This is a big highlight for them every year! I thought it was pretty neat that Rafi’s book this year had a note inside from someone else’s Christmas exactly 50 years ago. Instead of covering it up, we added to the history.

I always take portraits of the children with their books for our family photobook.

(Noah’s books were short, so he got two.)

CLICK HERE for an Instagram reel about my unconventional wrapping paper…

My mom usually sends a box of goodies for us at Christmas, so we opened that too! She always does such a good job finding things that are useful and won’t permanently add to our clutter. Craft supplies are always special (and don’t stick around forever): coloring books, painting pages, beads, etc.

This puzzle has been a huge hit.

Hot take that I’m a little scared to put out there on the internet but feel is important:

We don’t do Christmas gifts.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, we want Christmas to be about Christ and celebrating his birth. When we add gifts to that, it’s easy to lose the real meaning. Second, we’re conscious of not being materialistic and don’t want to accumulate too much stuff.

It’s next to impossible not to accumulate stuff, but we’ve found that our lives just feel less chaotic and the children actually play better when they have fewer toys. If each child gets several toys for birthday and Christmas, those add up so fast and they either clutter up the house or have to be thrown away or donated. We’re fans of buying used and donating what we don’t need to be good stewards of the world God gave us to live in, but even needless donation isn’t sustainable so we try to focus on what we actually need and can use.

So that’s why we’ve decided to do one book per child for something special on Christmas Eve. We do a few things for birthdays, but we try to keep that pretty low key too. The grandparents do great about asking us for useful gift ideas, which we really appreciate! We generally try to focus on imaginative toys that can be enjoyed by everyone, although they do get special things of their own too.

Our magnetiles were a gift from Grandma Margaret before we went to Africa and they are our most played with toy! The children love building houses, roads, airports, barns for toy animals, and playing bakery with my kitchen pans and making cakes and cookies out of tiles. Sometimes they get piled into suitcases as luggage for piling onto beds or couches to play “trip.” I’ve also found them useful for practicing place value math with Hadassah: the big squares for tens and the smaller ones for the ones place.

Other great grandparent gifts are craft supplies that get used up (colored pencils, markers, coloring books, paint pads), puzzles, and books.

My mom got this cash register for them, and that has also been a great imaginative play piece (supplemented by magnetiles, cans from the pantry, and the contents of the recycle bin).

In Africa the children mostly played outside with cans, sticks, and broken cement blocks. We’ve had to be a bit more creative finding inside activities since coming back to the States and living in the suburbs – especially during the winter in Nebraska. For a long time the children didn’t know what to do with themselves and seemingly lost their ability to play independently, but they’re thankfully regaining their ability to imagine.

You can use almost anything to make a play house:

And blanket fort picnics are also fun:

I’m definitely not saying that this is the only way to “do Christmas,” but I’m sharing what has worked for us in case you’re feeling the stress of finding gifts for everyone or finding the constant accumulation of stuff to be distracting from what’s important. You don’t have to do things like everyone else. It’s okay and your children can be perfectly happy and content (and possibly more so) with less.

Who knows – maybe our Christmas will look different when our children are older. It’s good to learn to give to others, so when they’re old enough to put more thought into being involved maybe we’ll find a way to do a gift exchange that’s not necessarily connected with Christmas. I know some families exchange gifts at New Years or Valentine’s Day.

I always think it’s neat when families (or even holiday party gift exchanges) specify a theme like books, or something handmade, or something thrifted. Choosing to put time and energy into providing something special for people in need, making a donation to a good charity, or choosing to make a family memory instead of giving gifts are also great ideas. If your family has done something “out of the box” to try to keep Christmas focused on Christ, I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments!

This year Ryan was working on Christmas, but he was able to meet us in the afternoon to go ice skating at a local rink. Being Canadian he’s an excellent skater. Being from the south, I am most decidedly not. Here’s to hoping we can introduce our children to the art at a young age so they can take after their father.

In the evening we had a roast dinner for something special and read the Christmas story. It was a quiet Christmas this year, but with an impending visit to Ryan’s family in Canada for New Year’s, we enjoyed a low key celebration at home.

May God bless each of you and your families in the coming year with peace and a focus on what is truly important. Christ was born to die so that you can LIVE!

I put together a playlist of some of my favorite Christmas music. You can see it here on YouTube if you’re interested.