holiday traditions

The holiday season is upon us! I love this time of year because it brings all my favorite traditions and has some of my very favorite memories. Ask husband, I'm big on traditions! There are so many we love participating in with our families, but since this will be our second holiday season as a married couple, and the first in our own home I figured it was a good time to start some new traditions of our own! And of course get excited about everything we love doing with our families. 

There are many, but here are some of the highlights of the season.

Thanksgiving

What we already love:

- Conner's family always eats Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, so we spend Thursday hanging out, making pies, and going to a movie. Definitely looking forward to that this year. Also, homemade pies are obviously the best, but my favorite store bought is definitely this one! Buy one, you won't be sorry!

- This isn't necessary a holiday season tradition but I associate it with the holidays... whenever we go home to California to be with Conner's family we go to Fentons Creamery to get ice cream. If you've ever seen the movie Up, it's the ice cream shop they go to and it's the best! It's something all the Whipple cousins look forward to anytime we are together in northern California.

- When we lived in Wisconsin, we picked up the tradition of making caramel-dipped cranberries. They might sound a little weird but they are seriously addicting! Do yourself a favor and make them this year. They basically taste like mini caramel apples. SO good!

       Step 1: buy a bag of fresh cranberries

       Step 2: stick toothpicks in them

       Step 3: dip them in caramel (preferably this kind) the way you would apples.

What we want to start:

- A thankful jar - we're a little late to the game on this one since I only found this on Pinterest a few days ago - but how cute is this!? I love the idea of putting out a thankful jar on the first November and filling the jar all month long. Then on Thanksgiving, we can read all the things we have to be grateful for, because there really are so many!

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 Christmas

What we already love: 

- My grandpa was born in the Netherlands so every year we celebrate Dutch Christmas. On December 5th we put out our klompen filled with carrots for Sinterklaas to feed to his white horse, and in exchange he leaves stroopwafels, chocolate letters, almond cakes, and other goodies.

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- Each year my family packs a "goodie bag" of oranges, hand sanitizer, tissues, etc. that we take to a rest home to give out as we carol and wish people a happy holiday season.

- The movies, so many movies. Both our families love watching all the classic Christmas movies - Elf, White Christmas, The Grinch, A Christmas Story, all those. And the hot chocolate, so much hot chocolate. We love a local Utah brand, Stephens the best. {Conner's favorite. My favorite.}

- Going on a special date to celebrate getting engaged. Conner proposed 10 days before Christmas, so celebrating our relationship has become a big part of the holiday season for us the past couple of years.

What we want to start:

- Decorating a Christmas Tree together! In our apartment we didn't have much room so I borrowed some mini faux trees from my mom that already had light on them. They were really cute but I'm looking forward to getting a big tree to decorate this year! Here's what our decorated apartment looked like last Christmas.

{also, I just love the sparse little tree my mom put in the family room last year}

- Last year when we were both in school and making Christmas cards didn't seem like the best way to spend our limited Christmas budget. But it made me really sad we didn't get to send them out. This year we made Christmas cards and used Tiny Prints. I can't even tell you how hard it was to narrow down on one design. They have so many, and they are all cute. Really you have to check them out. It probably took me a week just to pick which one to use. I'm really happy with how they turned out. I definitely recommend using them. I'll be sure to post a picture of ours close to Christmas!