I love Christmastime! I love the activities and traditions we do as a family. And the time we spend together to play is my favorite. In the next few blog posts, I will share some of our activities and traditions we do this time of year.

This year I started to present our activities in a gift box. Each day or two in December my kids get to open the box and see what activity we will do that day. It has been fun for them to open their surprise and anticipate some family time.

On December 1st we filled "the box" twice. In the morning the kids opened the box to find chocolate advent calendars to countdown the days until Christmas.

We refilled the box in the afternoon for the kids to open after school to reveal our evening family activity- Polar Express Movie Night.


In the box we included:

Polar Express DVD
Recipe for Creamy Hot Chocolate (found at the end of this post)
Marshmallows, candy canes for hot chocolate mix-ins
Popcorn
Bells (Dollar Tree had some really cute bells this year in silver and gold.)

I didn't print any cute tickets but there are plenty on the internet you can download.

Each year our family opens up Christmas pajamas on Christmas Eve. However, my sister changed this tradition and has her kids open up their pajamas on December 1st so her kids can wear them all through December. I think that we may have to switch up our tradition as well. Next year pajamas may be included in our box.

We loved watching the Polar Express together and loved our hot chocolate. Mmm. Here's a recipe we found and changed up a bit to our liking.

Click HERE to download and print the recipe.