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Ep. 205 | Favorite Christmas Traditions for Family Teams · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  To us, it's really fun because it's a really cool way to serve and love and kind of honor people around you. What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here with the holidays here and coming. Hopefully, you're listening to Kenny G. I started listening to Kenny G in July, so it doesn't really matter what time of year it is. But favorite Christmas traditions for family teams. And I think that's a good question. How do you actually have traditions that actually support the family team, not just disintegrate the family or turn into some type of consumeristic tradition? So Jeremy, how have you guys thought through this?
• 0:30
  Yeah, so our favorite family tradition that I think we've enjoyed is around sibling gift giving. And this is something we talk about in the 31 Creative Ways book. So just a little, if you want to see the rest of those different ways. But one of the things that we've loved about Christmas is when our kids were pretty young, we had this awesome sort of secondhand sort of toy store, had books, had clothes.
• 0:54
  And so one by one, we would take the kids in, and they would spend 20 bucks or something getting little gifts for all of their siblings. And so this just caused the kids, when Christmas Day came, there was as much, and even for some of our kids, even more excitement as they anticipated watching their siblings open up the gifts that they had picked out than they were feeling about opening their own gifts. And that's a huge win, right? Because you're kind of experiencing...
• 1:23
  They're experiencing that a lot of the joy from Christmas at a very early age comes from giving. Their focus on Christmas Day isn't completely on themselves, but is on their siblings. There's bonds going on. The siblings are communicating to each other, hey, I know you like this thing, so I thought about you, and I got you something. So there were just so many cool things that came out of that that it became a bigger and bigger tradition. Now that our kids are older, they don't just go to secondhand stores. They go to the mall, and they go to other places.
• 1:49
  They go to Amazon like everybody else, but they have carried on this tradition of buying gifts for one another, which has been super cool for our family. But yeah, Jeff, what about you guys?
• 2:01
  I love that. Yeah, I'm going to cheat. I'm going to think of two. One's a tip and one's a tradition. The tip that I found very helpful if you have toddlers is this one's huge is first of all, don't be afraid to be ruthless about telling everyone around you that you don't need that many toys. Like everyone freaks out about that. Just say we don't want that much stuff. Do not give it or be practical, right? Give us pajamas, give us books, whatever. This is, by the way, a really practical one. One thing we've done before is we've asked anyone who's close family members, we kind of pick a theme. So one year it was like,
• 2:27
  pick your favorite childhood book that maybe has sentimental value for you when you were a kid. So that's, you know, some books from the seventies or eighties, if there's a grandparent or something, you know, and then write a little note in it to the kid. Um, and then, you know, give it to them on Christmas. So then we get eight really special sentimental books that have a story behind them or have a theme or something like that. But what I was going to say is,
• 2:45
  We, because we're really ruthless with that, we don't get that many gifts, maybe like seven, eight, nine combined between us, grandparents, whatever for the kids. And then one quick tip that we do that's really helpful for our family and extends the holidays is really fun and also creates a lot more thankfulness is however many toys you get or how many presents you get back those back those presents up as many days as you have until Christmas. So like if we have seven toys, then we start opening presents on December 18th, right? Yeah.
• 3:09
  And it's one present a day. And what that does is it doesn't just create this, because I can't stand the Christmas, like, you know, let's open 17 things at once and there's paper everywhere. First of all, my OCD just hates how messy that is. Second of all, you know, I just think it creates like a weird, entitled consumeristic mentality when it's like, no, one gift,
• 3:26
  that I then want to thank one person for giving it to me. And I want to enjoy that for what it is and extract the value from it. So that's one tip. Tradition, I would say, is kind of go on fun little missions with your kids. You know, one really fun tradition we do is we'll take our, we get our Christmas cards printed still, you know? And so we'll take a Christmas card and usually like a treat, like sometimes it'll be candied nuts or whatever. And we maybe make up 10 batches or whatever, put them in Mason jars with a nice little ribbon so they look cute. And we go around and give those to neighbors. We just knock on their door. Some neighbors were
• 3:55
  We've had that before. But you know, you just got to do it, you know, and to us, it's really fun because it's a really cool way to serve and love and kind of honor people around you. And by the way, it doesn't have to be all homemade and crafty. There was one year because I hate sweets. And so there was and so I tried to get rid of them as soon as possible. There was one year where someone gave us these like really pretty like candied pretzels with all these sprinkles on it and Christmassy colors and all that and chocolate dipped and all that.
• 4:19
  And I just don't like that stuff. So I usually just throw it away or give it away. And I was like, you know what? This would be great to repackage this in Mason jars to look like we made it for our neighbors. So I literally just took out all the stuff and put it in like cute packaging. And then we put a ribbon on it again with our Christmas card. And I didn't say that we made it. I wasn't lying. Right.
• 4:36
  Um, but it did look, it did like make us look really impressive. And then we gave that to our neighbors. So I'm just saying like, sometimes it's just like repurposing, recycling, redoing. But the main thing is, man, it's a really good opportunity to serve your neighbors. And I think with toddlers, that's such an easy little mission.
• 4:52
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