Simplifying Christmas....Simple Family traditions...

Day 6 of Simplifying Christmas...following along with the meme started on Heart of a Mommy's Blog 

What are some of your simple family traditions? Now that my kids are getting older some of the things they found "So Fun" when they were little are getting a bit boring to them :( So I try to think of new and exciting things each year to keep them excited about the holidays. Some of our Christmas traditions are

Our Christmas traditions start out with the parade welcoming Santa into town. And next with the first Saturday of December when the kids get to go to the church and have Breakfast with Santa :) They serve pancakes and orange juice, the have craft tables set up and the kids get to talk to Santa.

Then the following day, the first Sunday of December we put out our table top nativity set. I have one of those cheap little round tables from the Dollar General store that I drape a red table cloth over and we set the nativity scene on that table in the corner of the dining room.

They are very simple traditions, and hopefully we will add some more to our Christmas season here...but what we do is definitely simple :)

On Christmas Eve the kids get to open one gift, and they always know that it will be PJ's :)

On Christmas Day in order to make the unwrapping of gifts take a little longer (great for families like ours who do not get each child lots of gifts) we play a game using a deck of cards. My husband shuffles the cards very well and then each child gets to draw a card. The person with the highest card gets to open a present, but the person with the lowest card can say if they get a big or little present to open :) We started this one year when we did not have many gifts and the kids LOVED it and request it every year.
We don't have many food based family traditions I guess... I do let the kids make Chrismtas cookies each year all on their own, even though they do make quite a mess lol! We have done that every year now since we have moved into our house we live in now so thats probably the only real food based tradition we do. I bake alot in the winter time as it is, and all 3 of the older kids love to make a mess in the kitchen :)
Here is a picture of them from their first year making cookies...

and let me just say my how they have grown from them until now!