9 Amazing Christmas Traditions For Adults to Start This Year

This post is all about Christmas traditions for adults!

Traditions and rituals are important to incorporate into families. They allow family members to connect in meaningful and consistent ways. You can build a meaningful tradition in 3 easy steps by using communication, commitment, and consistency.

Step 1: Communicate – talk about and decide what traditions you want to start and why. Decide what makes the tradition meaningful to you specifically.

Step 2: Commit – you need to be able to commit to your tradition every single year. It might be easiest to pick a simple tradition that you can keep even when you have unique years where you spend Christmas snowed in, on vacation, or with relatives. These circumstances will not break tradition if you commit to it.

Step 3: Be consistent – this year, you can start a tradition, but it won’t become a tradition unless you do it again next year and every year after! Make sure to document your new tradition with a journal entry, pictures, or even a reminder in your phone set to go off next year.

Even adults can can start new Christmas traditions this year! As you do so, you’ll be able to cherish your Christmas memories and eagerly look forward to each year’s festivities.

This post will give you 9 amazing ideas for Christmas traditions that you can start this year!

Christmas Traditions

1) Serve

The best Christmas traditions involve service for others. For many, the Christmas season can be stressful, lonely, or just plain dreadful. Find the people who could use some holiday cheer and figure out unique ways to serve them!

Here are some ideas, categorized into the people you are looking to serve:

For the elderly:

Visit them in their home
Give them a call
Bring them cookies
Shovel their walk
Offer to pick up their groceries
Invite them to Christmas dinner
Set up a zoom/skype/facetime call with them
Write a card to them
Organize a singing group for an old folk’s home

For kids:

Bring them a Christmas treat
Take them to visit Santa
Drop off some craft supplies
Bring them a stuffed animal
Buy them a mini Christmas tree and decorations
Decorate cookies with them
Take them caroling

For teens and adults:

Invite them over for hot cocoa
Deliver secret Santa gifts
Bring them cookies
Write them a sweet note
Get them tickets to a holiday show/activity
Offer to Christmas shop with or for them
Shovel their driveway
Buy them some new gloves/hats
Scrape ice off their car windows

2) Read a holiday book

An excellent way to get into the Christmas spirit is to read about Christmas!

You can go classic and pick a specific day to read the account of Christ’s birth in the bible each Christmas season. This can be found in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2

There are also many holiday books about Christmas miracles and stories. You can find a plethora of options simply by googling it!

3) Go to a holiday event

Christmas events are so fun to go to and there are so many options to choose from!

You might be interested in some of the following:

(for those local to Utah, I’ve linked a few of these activities to local websites with more information)

Find a local ballet group doing the nutcracker
Go sledding
Get the peppermint shake flavor at Chick-fil-a
Find a local theatre putting on “A Christmas Carol“
Go ice skating
See Santa at the mall
Make gingerbread houses
Cut down a Christmas tree
Go skiing and/or snowboarding
Visit the ice castles
Go snowshoeing
Try out snowmobiles
Drink hot chocolate
Go caroling
See a light show

4) Get each other unique ornaments

A simple tradition that is doable wherever you are each holiday season is to gift your spouse or friends or yourself a unique ornament.

If you are gifting this to a spouse, pick out an ornament that represents something notable that happened for your spouse that year.

If he or she graduated from college, you might get them a graduation cap ornament. Or, if they learned Spanish, maybe you could find a sombrero ornament. Finally, if they tried skiing for the first time, you can find them a skier ornament.

This tradition can be super fun and really sweet. After years of filling up your tree with unique ornaments, you’ll be able to tell years of stories and see how you’ve evolved as people.

What a fun way to add meaning to the Christmas season!

5) Watch a holiday movie

There are SO many excellent holiday movies you can watch as a tradition. Some people like to watch the same movie on Christmas eve each year. Others would like to watch a new release film the day after Christmas. Still others might be interested in watching one holiday movie each night of December as a way to count down to Christmas.

Decide what movie tradition sounds best to you and try it out!

Here’s a list of some of my favorites:

6) Bake your favorite treat(s)

Grab your spouse or friends, some ingredients, and a kitchen! Spend an afternoon baking and decorating your favorite holiday treats.

This might be a tradition that you carry on from your family of origin. Many people grow up making holiday treats with their immediate family members and extended relatives.

If not, don’t be afraid to start this tradition anyway! It’s super fun because this is a fun tradition to share with your relatives staying over, your friends in town, or your future children. Plus, you get to eat the end results!

Some of my favorite homemade Christmas treats are:

Fudge
Danish apple bars
Peppermint bark
Chex mix
Rolo pretzels
Chocolate bombs
Hot chocolate bombs

If you are looking for more Christmas treat ideas, I’m always adding delicious-looking recipes to my “Christmas treats” board on Pinterest, which you can find by clicking that link 🙂

7) Order a specific food

The Christmas season is always a blur of rushing, shopping, visiting, and more! Sometimes the last thing you have time for is to make more food. To all those non-bakers out there, this tradition is for you! One fun and ingenious Christmas tradition is to order instead of cook your favorite food.

This tradition can be especially fun on Christmas eve or day. While other families are having a big homemade dinner, you can save yourself the time and energy of cooking for everyone by going out instead.

You might take your whole family/group of friends to a buffet, where everyone gets to pick what they want to eat and you didn’t even have to cook anything!

Another idea is to grab some takeout – maybe pizza, Chinese, or burgers – and have a picnic in your living room by the tree. Then, you still get to enjoy your festive home, but you don’t have to worry about doing a million dishes afterwards.

I know a few people who swear by this tradition. Their family decided that they would rather spend more time enjoying the meal and less time stressing out about cooking. Who knows? It might be your cup of tea.

8) Give Christmas to others

Still in the service mood? You might find that one of the most fulfilling and meaningful Christmas traditions involves giving others the gift of Christmas.

There are many ways to do this! If you know of a family or friend in your neighborhood who is struggling financially, you might take a trip to the store just for them! If you can, figure out if they have sufficient clothing and food and buy whatever they lack. You can throw in some fun Christmas gifts, especially if they have children. You can even include some Christmas decorations in order to spruce up their place and help them feel the holiday spirit.

There are also organizations set up where you can “adopt” a child or family in need and gather products to give them for Christmas. Check out justserve.org to get some ideas.

You can also ‘give Christmas’ by donating to the plethora of local charities! There is plenty of need for your money in local schools, homeless shelters, youth programs, and more.

Keep your eyes and ears open at work, in school, on social media, or at church for opportunities to give to others during the holidays.

9) Make each other personalized gifts

A final fun Christmas tradition you can start with loved ones is making each other personalized Christmas gifts. This can be much more meaningful than buying each other commercialized gifts!

A few simple ideas for handmade gifts are:

Write a letter
Bake cookies
Write a poem
Make an ornament
Put together a photo album

If you’re a little craftier, you might be able to:

Make personalized Christmas decorations
Knit/sew some hats/gloves/socks
Build a shelf or table
Paint a specialized piece

Or any other ideas you have!

This post showed you a bunch of ideas for Christmas traditions for adults!

Happy holidays,