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Today I'm kicking off a new series on the podcast, and I am giddy about it because it's all about the holidays. We're all thinking about it already. It's the last week of October. We're looking at November and December, and I think we can feel equal parts overwhelmed and excited. So today I am starting a five-part podcast series. It's gonna be very short podcast episodes just to get you thinking about how you can create holidays that are full of joy and contentment.

And I'll get into all the details of it. But here's what you can expect. The first episode, which is today, is gonna be about traditions. Next week it's gonna be about creating your holiday schedule. Then the next week, your holiday budget, and then your gifts, and then food. And I'm gonna be sharing all of the things that our family does while also just inviting you to think through and really, I don't know, analyze and consider what you want your holidays to look like. And I'm excited. I'm so excited about this. So I'm glad that you're here. Let's jump in.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

There's nothing that sums up the holidays more than the words “work and play”, because it is a whole lot of work to enjoy a whole lot of play. I think about Christmas and I think about the work and the planning that goes into celebrating the beauty of Christmas morning so that you can be fully present and play and enjoy one another and enjoy presents and enjoy celebrating our savior.

But there's so much work that goes into it. So what I've done, I've thought about these like five major categories of the holidays. And I'm looking, you know, we're at the end of October. There's the Halloween festivities, and then there's Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving break and traditions around that holiday. And then of course, that catapults us right into the Christmas season. And there's so many different parties and traditions that revolve around Christmas.

And to me, I, I love all of this. I, I love the holidays. I am giddy about it, but I certainly have my moments of crazy stress and overwhelm. And so by dividing it into traditions, schedule, budget, gifts, and food, my hope is to break it down and simplify it and actually just invite you and do the same thing myself to ask what do I really want my holidays to look like, and how do I, on the front end of this, before it ever happens on the front end, go ahead and create the boundaries and make a plan to include the things that are most important before our schedule just takes over and the holiday craziness just takes over? So I'm most excited about today's episode. I think, well, maybe I'll say that every time because I'm talking all about traditions.

Now, before I jump in, one more thing I wanna say, I have created this amazing PDF that goes with this, and it's just for my patrons, and it's something that you can print out and fill in and write on and budget with, and you even get a few of my favorite recipes as part of it. And I'm just thrilled to be able to give this to my patrons because that is gonna be like your little booklet, your guide that's gonna take you through these next five episodes. So if you want that downloadable PDF, it's our fall exclusive for my patrons only. Head over to patreon.com/workandplay to grab yours.

Okay, let's talk about traditions. I, I just get so nostalgic talking about this. I love traditions. There's such a beautiful way to spend time together as a family to build core memories with your kids and to be creative with ways to talk about the Christmas story. You know, traditions are the avenue. They are the thing that help you focus on Christ. They're the thing that helps you to stop and really focus on what matters. What is the meaning of this? And I know I'm talking about Christmas, but you can apply this to Thanksgiving too. Like, let's do these traditions as a family every Thanksgiving or every Christmas so that we can really pause and make this celebration what it deserves to be.

They are the way that you foster contentment and joy into your holidays, and they're the things that your kids are gonna remember. I know right now your kids probably just like my kids are very focused on the gifts and that is normal and fun for kids. But what they're gonna remember, what I remember from my childhood, even though we had great amazing Christmases and wonderful gifts, what I remember the most are the times I spent with my family and the traditions that we did together.

And so this is important stuff. This is, and it's beautiful because it's given to us to choose and guide our family through during the holiday season. So take a moment. Here's my challenge to you. Just take a moment and write out all your traditions that you have over the next coming months. Just write 'em all down, like anything that you can think of, whether they're like events with family or whether it's like a small thing that you do at bedtime every night. Just write down your traditions.

And then I want you to just read over them and think through what, what traditions bring me the most joy. Which ones are the ones that point to the true meaning of Christmas? Are there any that are just so extra and difficult to pull off that they're adding more stress to your life than you really need? Any traditions that you're doing just for the sake of doing 'em that really don't matter as much. And here's the thing, every year's a little bit different. Your kids are gonna get older. Traditions might change. Like what, what are the ones that are most important you to you this year? Considering the ages of your kids, considering their little hearts and how you want to form them and teach them about what matters most in your family. What are the ones that stick out to you? Consider all of these things.

And so take some time after you, like, brainstorm all of them. Go through and like cross out the ones that you don't need anymore that you wanna let go of and circle or highlight the ones that really mean the most to you as a family. And then write in some more. You might hear a couple at the end of this episode when I share some of my traditions that you want to implement in your family. You absolutely should take as many as you want. You might hear some from other families. You get to make it your own.

So I'm just gonna share some of our favorite traditions on the podcast now just because I feel like I get so inspired from other families who do things in a certain way or maybe, I don't know, it's just like different or creative. And I just like the, I just like to hear what other people do. And so I'm just gonna take some time very briefly to walk you through our holiday traditions, October, November, December, and take or leave as much as you want.

So starting in October, we, this has kind of happened accidentally over the last few years, but we have now chosen to be that family that dresses up altogether and we're all different characters from the same movie. And deciding on that is a whole ordeal in our family, but it's actually become, I feel like part of our family culture. And it's hilarious to see the kids so invested in how we are gonna dress up for Halloween. And usually we just dress up for our church people and then we'll like walk to a few houses in our neighborhood. But the thing that brings us together the most is just the dressing up and the planning and the discussing and having fun together as a family.

In November for Thanksgiving, we love to take a trip to the mountains of North Carolina if we can. Doesn't happen every year, but if we can, we love to do that to see the beautiful fall leaves. And while we're traveling, we will take some time to write our thankful lists. Now I go into detail about this very specific Thanksgiving tradition in episode 33. That's a, that's a while ago. nancyray.com/podcast/33.

We'll get our Christmas tree as a family, we always pick it out as a family. If we're in the mountains, we'll get it off the mountain. If we are not and we're here in Raleigh, we'll just go to like a local, you know, tent farm in buy one there. But we always pick it out together. And then, so we never decorate our Christmas tree put up till the day after Thanksgiving. But when we do, this is a simple tradition that I'm so glad that I did. I, we started this when Will and I were married. I just took a few Polaroids of us decorating the tree together, just me and Will.

And as of course we had Millie, I just took a few Polaroids of like the first time she decorated the tree. And every year now we take like four or six Polaroids of us decorating the tree together. And I have a book and every year we add, we, we add our Christmas card and all of those Polaroids of us decorating the tree into this book.

And it has been such a sweet like Christmas memory book and our kids love helping to take the pictures now. It's really, really sweet.

Decorating for Christmas is just a tradition in and of itself. And one thing that we do like after we decorate, and that's actually included in all of our decoration boxes, is 25 children's books. And we pull that big box of books out with all our decorations and then Will and I just wrap them in Christmas wrapping paper. And so days 1 through 25 of December each night our kids get to open, they take turns opening it, our kids get to open a Christmas book. And this is one of my favorite traditions because it's very sweet. It's something we all gather around. We read the book as a family and so many of them just make me cry. They're just beautiful.

I mean one that comes, we, we always start at two. The first one is always the Giving Manger because that's a tradition that we do. I don't know if you've heard of The Giving Manger, but it's a wonderful company. I'll leave a link in the show notes that really fosters giving as a family and doing things for one another and for your neighbors. And and that's the first book. And then the last book is this old, old book that my mom got for us that tells the Christmas story. And we always open that on Christmas Eve. And I'll tell you the tradition that we do then in a few minutes. But opening those books every night is really, really sweet.

We always attend the Duke Chorale Christmas concert with the Thomas family, some dear friends of ours. We always attend Behold The Lamb of God concert, it's on tour, Andrew Peterson's, part of it, Jess Ray, my sister-in-law, she's part of it. It's incredible. Even if you don't go to see this show, which you should make every effort to see it, even if you don't, please listen to the album. It's beautiful. Behold The Lamb of God, it's on Spotify. We love those two events. They're just, they get you in such a Christmas spirit. I love it so much.

Okay, this is like a give or take one for us—matching Christmas jammies. Some, some years we do it, some years we don't. But this year Sam's Club had some really soft ones on sale for like $11 each. So here's a quick little hack for that too. Our kids are 2, 4, 6, and eight. So I bought jammies in sizes 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 because guess what, these Christmas jammies are gonna last us for two years now. Millie's just gonna move up to the size 10 ones next year. And then Lyndon will take size eight and then Beaufort will take size six, and then Benji will be in size four. Isn't that brilliant? Ah, just that's for free. That's just for you. Just buy an extra pair of jammies, like a size up and then they'll last you for two years. Okay?

One thing we've done in the past, which I wanna bring back, but kind of was on pause for the last several years for whatever reason, is hosting a Christmas caroling night with friends and family who love to sing. And I just make a big pot of chili. And then we practice the songs and we just walk around a neighborhood and sing Christmas songs. It is sometimes like kind of awkward, but most of all like, just mostly just very fun. It was very fun. I just love to sing. So anything that involves singing is a win, especially Christmas songs.

We always do our Christmas Eve service, Christmas Eve at church, followed by like a charcuterie-style dinner. I don't do like a big dinner that I have to bake, but something that I can just pull out and warm up and serve really quick. My sister loves to do a giant Chick-fil-A nugget tray.

And I just think that's so simple and brilliant on Christmas Eve. We'll, you know, unwrap that final Christmas book, but Christmas Eve, this is my favorite, okay? This is my favorite set of traditions. The kids read the book, but we get our little nativity set and we put it on our coffee table and we get out Jesus' birthday cake and Will reads the book. And as he reads it, every child acts out the nativity. So they each have a character and they always wanna be Jesus. They always wanna be Mary, Joseph. But some people, like some of the little kids will be the wise men and some will be the shepherds. And so they each have a role to play and usually Will holds a flashlight for the star.

Now this is something that my family did as I was growing up. It was my favorite thing and I knew I wanted do it with my kids because it's a simple way, once again, to point their hearts to the Christmas story in a fun way that children can understand and participate in. And so we act out the whole book and then we sing Happy Birthday to Jesus and eat some birthday cake or cookie cake or my mom used to make coconut cake, but that's just really a sweet like sweet night.

And then of course in the morning, we always make them sing happy birthday to Jesus before they come down the stairs and they come down the stairs and open presents.

A couple of Christmas morning traditions. Okay, our food, we love having like a cream cheese, danish, some sausage, and I think that's it. Maybe some eggs. Of course, mom and dad have coffee of course, and we have like fresh orange juice and you know, maybe some fruit too.

But we, this is my favorite thing. Okay? Again, this is taken from my mom. We play the same album every Christmas morning. It's called A Midnight Clear. It's by John Nilsen. It's the only day of the year we play this album. We don't play it even the month of December. It's a beautiful instrumental piano-only Christmas album. And every, every time I hear that first song, it's like, boom, it's Christmas morning. I know it's Christmas morning. It fills me with so much joy. So that one is something that you should consider. It is just having like a Christmas morning like playlist or album that you play only on Christmas morning. It just feels like Christmas. I mean, reminds me of my childhood is so sweet that we're doing that for our kids too.

We have other things that are scheduled. Of course we have, you know, visits with every grandparent for Christmas or around Christmas Day. And yeah, it's just, there's so many different plans that we have, but those traditions that I shared that are just kind of for our family are the ones that are most significant and that mean the most to us.

So I hope that you, as you listen, just got some ideas, or I hope that you just consider how you want to craft a meaningful, joyful, content Christmas season that constantly points back to the true meaning of Christmas with your family. And I hope that by me sharing a few of our traditions, maybe you've gained some inspiration in how to do that in your own family, your own way. But I'm really excited about this series and I hope that it just puts you in the Christmas holiday spirit this last three months of the year that are just so exciting and full of magic so that we can really take hold and make it as meaningful and beautiful as possible.

Thanks so much for listening to episode 213 of Work and play with Nancy Ray. Everything I've mentioned today can be found in the show notes at nancyray.com/podcast/213. And you can always find me over at nancyray.com or on Instagram @NancyRay.

Sally Clarkson said,