Guest Blogger Series: Amanda's Christmas Traditions

It's day three of my guest blogger series for the holidays! Woop! Every day this week I will be featuring one of my favorite gals from the blogosphere to share her own Christmas traditions.

Yesterday you heard from Elizabeth, and today we'll get the scoop from Amanda at Do I Even Like This? These ladies create a dialogue with their posts that is so unique and fun to read. Amanda is a fellow coffee addict and about as interested in adopting new technology as I am. (Page me, girl. I hit you back on my flip phone, yo.)

Tell us a story, A...

Christmas is my absolute favorite time of year and since the hubs and I are a family of two plus dog living away from our families, we’ve worked extra hard to develop some holiday traditions of our own. Here are four of the things that make our Christmases super special.

Christmas Eve is our time to celebrate the holiday together. We make dinner reservations at either a fancy or favorite restaurant, depending on our collective mood, and get prettied up for a very special date night. Since we’ve lived in northerly climates since we’ve been married (6 years!), we nearly always have snow so it feels extra special to take in the sights and lights on our venture to and fro. At home we change into our jammies, exchange gifts, listen to all of our Christmas favorites, sip cocoa and love on our pooch.

A view of the Hancock building taken through a veil of Christmas lights. Taken our first Christmas in Chicago.

One of my personal favorite traditions is sending holiday cards. We do this every year and although the hubs doesn’t relish all that envelope licking, he suffers it quietly for my sake. I think choosing a good Christmas card is such an important task since for so many people it will be the only way in which we’re able to offer a greeting of cheer. This is our first year doing photo cards, something that we had major reservations about but that I always love receiving from others.

Our card for this year, ordered from Minted.com with a photo from our Thanksgiving trip to Hawaii.

A newish tradition for us is Cookie Day with friends. We have a very dear group of friends and so we assemble in some kitchen quite early on a Sunday and bake until our fingers bleed. Well, the ladies do. The men watch football and work diligently as taste testers. All of our friends come from diverse backgrounds and so it becomes something of an international cookie festival. This year everyone got a little over-committed so we’re actually taking a day off from work to make this happen. Talk about commitment to the plan!

A sampling of the take from last year’s cookie extravaganza. There were so many more cookies than we could think to consume that we had to package them up to ship away to other friends and family.

Although the memories we create together are fantastic, I still love having a little something special to remember the year by. Yeah, something shiny. Each year we buy an annual ornament from Simon Pearce and have the back of the globe engraved with a word or phrase that reminds us of something special from the year. They usually reference travel but my favorite says “Mr. Ollie Goes To Connecticut” from 2006 when we adopted our pooch and then swiftly whisked him away to the wilds of Fairfield County.

From Simon Pearce website, 2011 Annual Ornament

Doesn't her Christmas Eve celebration sound like perfection? That's a tradition that M and I would love. (Noted.) And I totally appreciate the importance with which she considers Christmas cards. (Exhibit A.) Such lovely celebrations and certainly festive! Thanks for inspiration (and mad craving for some cookies right about now), Amanda!