In our family, we only have sugar cereal on birthdays and at Christmas. We don’t have anything against sugar cereals, in fact, I really love ones like Reese’s Puffs and Oreo O’s. But we found that when we did have sugar cereals, the kids would eat this huge bowl of cereal and then be hungry again not long after. Which is kind of a pain. So we made the decision to treat sugar cereals as more of a treat than an every day thing, and so began our birthdays and Christmas sugar cereal traditions.
When the kids were little, we’d go to the store on Christmas Eve so they could pick out their Christmas cereals because, to be honest, we didn’t want to listen to them continuously whine politely ask for their sugar cereals any sooner than we had to—like for days before Christmas. We discovered that the hard way one year. When it came time to go get our Christmas cereals, they would get pretty excited to load up in the car to head to the local grocery store! #funfamilyouting They learned very quickly that the bags of cereal were much larger than the boxes, so we’d be waiting in the lllllooooonnnnnggggg line at the store on Christmas Eve day with each kid holding their huge bag of cereal because they did not want to put them in the shopping cart.
Those bags of cereal were almost as big as the youngest kids.
It was pretty cute.
I wish I had pictures.
Nowadays, we can buy our cereals before Christmas Eve since they are older now and don’t “politely ask” for their cereals before Christmas. And even though our kids range from 22-30, they still ask about sugar cereals when they come home for Christmas. In fact, they’ll call before they even get into town to put in their sugar cereal requests.
I love that!
And actually, because of their “polite asking,” we started the tradition of also having sugar cereal for Christmas Eve dinner. Which I thought was an awesome tradition because I didn’t have to do one thing.
I’m all about keeping things as simple as possible—especially during the holidays.
So the “sugar cereal for Christmas morning breakfast” tradition evolved into a “sugar cereal for Christmas Eve dinner AND Christmas morning breakfast” tradition. The other fun thing about this tradition is that they’d all choose different cereals and then share, which to kids is one of the best things ever—a sugar cereal buffet right in our own kitchen! We’d also have regular milk AND chocolate milk, which made it even better!
Several years ago, when the kids were 17, 14, 11, and 9, some good friends invited us over for Christmas Eve dinner. We accepted the invitation and didn’t think a thing about it. When the kids heard about this new plan, you’d have thought we’d cancelled Christmas!
Oh, the uproar.
So we made a compromise that year and had sugar cereal for Christmas Eve lunch.
And everyone was happy.
Next year we’ll have our grandkids at our house for Christmas, and I’m so excited to be able to start sharing this tradition with them!
And I WILL get pictures this time!
What unusual holiday traditions do you love? Please share…I think the unusual ones can be the BEST!
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