It’s day two of the blog party over at MomDot.  Today is sponsored by : LaPlates and Lets Go Strolling and Natitys Design.

Today’s question is what are some of your favorite family traditions? What are some that you want to begin?

Traditions…let’s see, we eat A LOT over the holidays.  That’s always our recurring theme.  Good eats in good company.  But other than eating more than we should, as previously mentioned, the husband and I are both from VA, so a good portion of our holiday season is spent driving.  So unfortunately, our little family doesn’t have any traditions of our own…yet.  More on that in a bit.

For Thanksgiving, we often eat 2 turkey dinners or something similar since we try our best to balance both sides of our families.  After a traditional dinner with Jeff’s family, we usually watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. All the men in the house have every single word memorized.  EVERY.SINGLE.WORD.

Bethany: Is your house on fire, Clark?
Clark: No, Aunt Bethany, those are the Christmas lights.

At some point of the evening, we head off to my family’s house where we do more eating.  On top of the traditional Thanksgiving fare, we infuse a bit of Filipino food.  Our holiday dinners wouldn’t be complete without rice, pancit, lumpia.  By the end of the evening, we’re all turkey-ed out.

Jen and Jeff's Christmas Card 2006

Christmas is similar to Thanksgiving–same hectic travel, but even more fun.  We spend Christmas Eve with my family.  We have dinner and then usually end the evening at Midnight Mass, which is always one of the highlights of the holidays for me.  After mass, we always do our presents.  So, if you do the math, we’re up unwrapping gifts and playing with new toys at 3 a.m.!

After sleeping in and a delicious brunch, we head off to the husband’s family’s house.  We do more of the same celebration–more eating and gifts!  It’s always a blast.  We’re so fortunate to have such a large family, but juggling the two has been our biggest tradition.

BUT, that’s all about to change (I think!)  Our little family—Jeff, Jack and me—are staying local for Thanksgiving.  So for the first time ever, it’ll be just the 3 of us.  Though plans aren’t concrete yet, instead of traveling almost 400 miles, we are planning on attending the Macy*s Day Parade float inflation on Thanksgiving Eve.  I haven’t even begun to think about making dinner, but I can’t stop thinking about the floats!  So far, that’s the only tradition we hope to start.   Since the holidays are all about family, we’re all about traveling to go see them, but in this dwindling economy, we’re making cutbacks, too.  So we’re traveling for one holiday instead of all of them.  It’s time to start our own traditions/