On Christmas Eve, we were sent a wonderful gift box of festive treats. The box was huge and the girls were very excited to see what was inside. It was a fantastic surprise to start the final countdown to Christmas, especially because it was filled with festive family activities – perfect for keeping overexcited children busy.
Inside there were stockings, personalised decorations, letters to write to Santa, and tasty treats. Our favourite Christmas story, The Night Before Christmas was also included. The perfect book to read on Christmas Eve. Every year we have an advent calendar of Christmas books and films and this will be a great addition for next year. There was also a clever template so you could make large boot-shaped tracks in the carpet.
We each had a personalised paper cut decoration. They looked wonderful hanging on the tree. I like having new decorations each year but we hadn’t actually bought any this year. Each decoration was in the shape of a snowflake, with different colours for each of us.
There was a fun set of challenges to do over the table on Christmas Day. These were a lovely way to get the family talking.
Then the girls decorated their own Christmas decorations which we gave away as a little stocking filler for the relatives.
After that we made a Gingerbread House. This was easier to do using a kit with prebaked gingerbread walls. The girls enjoyed decorating the house with lots of sweets but didn’t really like waiting for the icing to dry before they could eat it.
It was a bit of a drizzly afternoon, so we spent the afternoon snuggled up, watching a festive film. We chose the Muppet Christmas Movie as the twins have a muppets obsession. One of their main presents this year was a Fozzy Batman. I think they had written Fozzy and Batman separately but forgot to use finger spaces but when we read it as “Fozzy Batman” decided that was exactly what she wanted. That was a hard present for Santa to track down – I can tell you.
Spending time together doing fun festive activities was the best way to spend Christmas Eve. These are the things I will remember, and I hope the children will too. I would love them to realise that, fun as opening all the present is, spending time together is the important part of Christmas.