8 Christmas Traditions We Love as Military Families

The holiday season can be a bittersweet time for military families. Often stationed far from family, and maybe even relying on a lottery system to ensure that your servicemember will even be at the home station at all for the holiday – spending Christmas without extended family can be a tough pill to swallow. Over the years, we have enjoyed finding stillness in these quieter holidays and the little traditions that we have created as a nuclear family (both before we had kids and since kids!)

Friendsmas!

Whether a big group or just another couple, we love celebrating the holidays with our new military friends! Finding “framily” (friends that are family) is such a blessing of military life and we enjoy taking this opportunity to relish in those connections – even if some of us will head home for the holidays. If you haven’t done a Friendsmas, our favorite tips are finding a time at least a week before Christmas when most can attend and having each couple bring a dish to complete the meal instead of one family making it all! Dirty Santa or White Elephant is a great addition too!

Looking at Lights

As military families, we can often find ourselves stationed in areas that don’t necessarily give off Hallmark Christmas movie vibes. So whether it’s a town tree lighting, zoo lights, or just driving around neighborhoods to find the best Christmas lights, we love to make a night of taking in whatever we can! Hot chocolate is highly recommended – candy cane addition is optional!

Giving Back

(Jen) I am so thankful for our previous squadron at McChord for starting this annual event of adopting an elderly person for Christmas from a local nursing home. In times when we were just buying gifts on Amazon for family that we would never see open/enjoy, it really brought us into the season of giving in the sweetest way to go and grab a few items for a senior citizen in a nursing home. Typically the items were so simple, new socks, slippers, maybe a book, and some candy. It felt good to think about a stranger being surprised by these gifts and somehow made me feel more connected to the local area. Definitely a tradition we plan to bring to our newest squadron!

(Kirst) One of my favorite traditions in my parent’s home growing up was making breakfast sandwiches for the local police department to feed the men and women on shift over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Now, we’re bringing that tradition to our home to make them for a local group we know is working over the holidays – this year that’s the domestically deployed unit at Shaw AFB.

Looking for a military-related giveback opportunity in your area? Look to see if your base is holding an Operation Cookie Drop. This is an event where volunteers bake cookies for single airmen in the dorms. Some bases have had over 5 digits of cookie donations! It tends to be a great event and is such a light to those airmen.

Christmas Cards

Okay we know we know, this is a dying tradition. But we are absolutely here for it, ESPECIALLY as military families. “Hi! We are over here! Don’t forget about us!” is basically what we are trying to say to our friends and family that we live so far from. On a sincere note, we both cherish receiving Christmas cards from our loved ones and reading about their life updates. We value the people in our lives who go out of their way to grab our new addresses, and love staying in touch by sending ours out as well! Looking for the best places to order cards this year? Check out our post HERE for a complete rundown of the top shops, their prices and offerings.

Secret Santa

Whether locally in your squadron or mailing a gift to your military bestie group across the globe, we love this idea of spoiling the people the military life has blessed you with. We recommend setting a budget and using an online system like THIS one to keep it truly a secret for everyone. You can even mix it up, if you’re worn out with the idea of more gift-giving, and do a recipe exchange with your closet friends and build a cookbook over time with your besties’ go-to recipes.

Christmas Eve Service

This was a tradition from our childhoods that we both found so sweet to spend with our significant other at our new respective churches. There is something about the purity and sweetness of a Christmas Eve service that really just puts us in full-blown Christmas mode, no matter where we are!

Food Traditions

Okay, we couldn’t let holiday chat go by without talking about the food traditions we have created surrounding it! (Jen) In my family, breakfast is everything. And every year it is the same, breakfast casserole or “Brunch Puff”, as we call it. THIS is the closest recipe to my family’s, but we add a sour cream layer on top of the bread (we use french). It is so good in the most comfort foodie way possible! We get up on Christmas morning, open stockings, and then break for Brunch Puff that had been baking before we jump into presents!

(Kirst) We love combining our favorites from both sides of the family and that starts with the 7 Fishes on Christmas Eve representing my husband’s Italian family heritage, then on Christmas Day we channel my Midwestern roots and do a good ol’ fashioned steak dinner, this year we’re mixing it up with a new au gratin potato recipe that’s silly easy to make and equally delish, you can find that HERE.

Facetiming Family

IYKYK, and if this is your family too, save yourself the hand-cramping and just grab our favorite tripod HERE, haha! Seriously though, it can be tough to find time to call family from home with time differences and different events going on, but whether its to watch people open presents or give them a recap on how the morning went, we value connecting with distant family at some point on the big day.