Christmas Traditions & Life Update

Hi Everyone,

I have definitely missed the Hive community since I have been offline for a while as I have lots of important milestones that I have achieved in my life recently. First of all, I have sold my takeaway business, second of all, I have moved into my forever home and third of all, most importantly, it's Christmas time and that's the time I spend quality time with my family.

It's the start of a new chapter for my family with the house move. We have set some traditions in place that we want the children to enjoy, as well as encourage our family to spend more quality time together as technology in this day and age is taking over our lives.

First tradition on the list was purchasing a real Christmas tree to put in the kitchen, we purposely wanted to purchase one for the pine smell which we absolutely love but this tree has no smell whatsoever! What a disappointment! I won't be buying my future trees from B&Q so next year I'll be sourcing one from a real Christmas tree farm.

Second tradition is to have our real Christmas tree decorated with all the handmade decorations my son made at school, eventually it'll have decorations that my daughter will have made. Our other tree, is an artificial one with fibre optic lights that I have had since I was a baby, is decorated with annually bought ornaments, which we normally buy on one of our travels from that year. This year our two ornaments, one for my son and one for my daughter, were bought from Brugge. There is a Christmas shop with wall to wall ornaments which we visit every year when we stop in Brugge before grabbing a waffle a few doors down.

Third tradition is to watch Christmas films and this year we chose Home Alone, a family favourite, and The Grinch which my son has fallen in love with. He has the sweetest reaction when the Grinch is stood at the top of the mountain, looking down at Whoville, and he will say 'Mummy, Grinch sad!'.

Fourth tradition is to have all our homemade advent calendars, all our advent calendars are reuseable so we fill in all the boxes with all goodies that we and the children like to have.

The final and fifth tradition is to decorate the house with the traditional foil decorations from the ceiling, bunting around the house and, the most important things, lights that we have in the windows. I normally have them on the outside of the house as well but this year I haven't had time to organise it so it'll have to wait till next year.

What our your traditions at Christmas? What does Christmas mean to you?

Until next time. Stay tuned.