Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you had a great time with friends and family. We celebrated with some old and new family traditions.

Ukrainian Christmas Eve Dinner

We ate a traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner on the 24th. We followed my mom’s recipes and made a feast that blessed with us leftovers for days. We didn’t cook all 12 meatless dishes, but we did have kutya (wheat porridge), borscht (beet soup), perogies, cabbage rolls, bread, beans, mushrooms, and pickles. Emily even braided the top of a sourdough loaf that I baked to make it look more like a kolach.

This was the first year that my dad’s partner Michelle joined us. She did well with all the new food.

Unwrapping Game on Christmas Eve

After dinner we often unwrap a family gift containing something we can enjoy that night, like matching pajamas or a new board game. The gift is wrapped in several layers of paper and cardboard, and you need to use oven mitts to open it. This year the prize (after all that hard work) was the game Takenoko.

Photo Ornament

Every Christmas we take a photo of Astrid and turn it into an ornament. To give it some nerdy flare and continuity, we make sure each photo contains the previous year’s ornament in it. It’s a fun little tradition that I’m happy we’ve kept going.

Relaxed Christmas Morning

When I was a kid, I feel like Christmas morning was a lot more hectic. But with only one child, we’ve fallen into a much more relaxed Christmas morning.

We started opening stockings at 8 am. Then we took a break to cook and eat potato pancakes. We didn’t have that many gifts but it still took us until 11:30 to finish slowly opening them, with breaks to chat with family members and friends on the phone.

We spent the afternoon playing new board games and assembling lego sets.

A Puzzling Present

Over the years we’ve instilled a love of puzzles in our daughter. Our Easter egg hunts are always full of riddles, and we brought some of that to Christmas this year. To unlock her big present, she had to first solve a series of math and word puzzles.

Her first reaction was: “I don’t get how this goes – huh!” – as she tossed the puzzles to the side. She was excited about the suitcase, just a little confused why it was locked.

Once she realized what she had to do, she had fun solving the puzzles – she needed a little bit of help on the Word Ladder and asked us to check her math answers, but she crushed the Symbol Sudoku, which I thought would be the hardest part.

I’m not sure if this will become a regular Christmas tradition, but I had fun designing the puzzles and it worked out pretty well. Astrid didn’t resent us for making her read and do math on Christmas morning, so I consider that a parenting win.

The only other thing of note is that everyone seems to be battling cold bugs. Astrid was sick 2 days before Christmas and still has a lingering cough. I came down with a fever after dinner on Christmas Eve and suffered through low energy for a few days. We were supposed to visit my sister on the 28th, but she got sick. Ugh. Definitely makes it harder to celebrate with everyone with so many germs floating around.

Here are some more pictures from Christmas. If you have any favourite Christmas traditions, drop them in the comments.