Monday ~ Christmas in July

Saturday night was the celebration of our 2nd Annual Christmas in July! I'd always thought that "Christmas in July" was a neat thing to celebrate, plus we should be thankful for Jesus' birth year round, right? So, me being the family celebration/tradition lover that I am, last year I called a new tradition! 

For one day in July, we put up a few of our decorations, play Christmas music, and wish each other a Merry Christmas. Instead of presents, everyone is charged to pick out some kind of baked good to make.The weeks leading up to our "CiJ" celebration finds each of us pouring over cookbooks and allrecipes.com to find the perfect dessert. Once everyone picks their poison, they give me the list of ingredients and I purchase it.

And then, everyone secretly quarantine's off the kitchen and gets down to baking! It would not be out of the ordinary to find sheets hung around the kitchen to ward off any chance discoveries of our carefully guarded baked-good secrets. Once the baking is over, I then take it all and wrap it in such a way that even I don't know what's in each package. We then have a white elephant gift exchange. It's simple, but oh so fun!

Everyone was in rare form this year!!

Sugar rush! =)

Stuart made pretzel bites: pretzels with Reeses or Rolo's melted on top, with an M&M to crown it.

Karis made mini raspberry cheesecakes.

Scott made...not sure what they are called, haha! But it's chocolate chip cookie dough lined in a muffin tin, with a Reese's in the middle, covered with brownie dough. Not pictures is two kinds of danish, Magic bars, Chocolate/Butterscotch Rice Crispie Treats, and Carmel brownies.

I have come to firmly believe that it's traditions, even the simple ones, are the things that knit a family together. It builds a bond between family members, a bond of doing something together and making a special memory together. Traditions give us a reason to always want to come home again. 

Go make a tradition in your family.