The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
5 Things To Do on Christmas (besides gifts) #53
Get your Downloadable Christmas Scavenger Hunt HERE
In this short Christmas episode, Jon shares the five grounding practices his family turns to every year—small rituals that help kids feel anchored and connected when the excitement, overstimulation, and big feelings of the holiday season hit. Centered on the idea that “kids need something predictable to hold onto when everything else feels big,” this episode offers simple traditions you can use today to bring more calm, closeness, and delight into your home.
Links to help you and me:
- To support the Podcast, Subscribe on Substack
- Get Jon’s Top Five Emotional Regulation Games
- Get Jon’s Book Punishment-Free Parenting
- Preorder Jon’s Children’s Book Set My Feelings Free
- Follow Whole Parent on
Welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John. This episode is going to be a little bit different than other ones, but maybe I'm going to make this a regular thing. As you can tell by the title, this is not me answering questions specifically. This episode is five things that you can do or traditions that you can create with your family that are not opening presents on Christmas. I'm not saying that you shouldn't open presents on Christmas. I've obviously made a lot of videos, including the podcast episode about the how to reduce gift overwhelm in kids, that maybe uh shines a light on the overconsumption of gifts or too many gifts being a problematic or overwhelming thing to kids or dysregulating thing for kids. But this episode is about five things that you can do outside of those present opening type things. And so if you want to know what those are, let's get into it. Welcome back out to the porch. I'm excited to have this conversation tonight to present my five things that I am doing. And I actually think I have six things. I have a bonus one for you. Six things that we have tried to do. Some of them we do every year, instead or after opening presents on Christmas. If you've ever had this experience, I've definitely had this experience as a kid. Uh certainly had it as an adult now that I have kids. You have this Christmas morning experience, which often fits whatever you know family dynamic that you typically have. But then Christmas morning comes along and kind of disrupts that. And I don't know what it looks like for you. But for me growing up, it was usually the youngest kid in the house, which was always me, because I was the youngest of three, getting up first and making a mad dash down the stairs to wake up, get up everybody else in the house yelling, it's Christmas, it's Christmas, everybody get up. You know, Santa came or whatever that looked like. And getting everybody up, getting everybody ready to go down to the living room, which is a which is a room that was basically unused in my house growing up. My parents had a formal living room as well as what like it's called a den. We called it the den. And the den is where the TV was, it was where the family PC computer was. We didn't have multiple laptops or anything like that. Our only connection to the internet was a you know plugged into the phone jack, and it was a T it was a computer in the main living room of the house, or the main uh den of the house, as main hub. And the den in our house was kind of connected, it wasn't it wasn't a true open floor plan because it was built in like the early 90s, but it was an addition to this hundred-year-old house that my parents owned. And in the den, it kind of connected to the kitchen, and that was the the room where basically I spent my whole childhood. The room where I didn't spend my childhood was the living room, and this living room was a formal living room, and I don't mean my parents were like stiff or uh you know stuffy or anything like that, but the living room couches were bright white. I I kid you not, they were bright white. And so this was not a room that was particularly kid friendly. The things that were in the living room were like, you know, a nice oriental rug that my mom had gotten on some one of her trips, or maybe my dad had gotten on one of his business trips. Uh, a coffee table, which kind of always looked out of place because for my basically my whole childhood, we had like a modern coffee table, but everything else in the room was kind of old and more antique looking. Yeah, a huge fireplace mantle. It was an addition to the house, actually. Well, the house didn't originally have a fireplace, but my mom, that was like her one thing that she really wanted was a fireplace. And that was why we gathered here. Also, in that room that was the piano and the Christmas tree. But this is not a room that I spent almost any time in growing up. It was a room that we ran through. We it was connected to the front door, but we didn't go in and out of the front door of my house. My brother, my oldest brother, had a room that was kind of off of the living room. Other than going in and out of his room occasionally, we really didn't spend any time in the living room. It was just kind of a pass-through as you would go from the downstairs area, which included the den and the kitchen where we ate almost all of our meals. We also had a formal living room or formal dining room that we never ever used. The table was just constantly filled with mail. My parents were not very good about opening the mail, and I have unfortunately inherited that too. Uh sorry if you've ever sent me a letter and I have not replied. It was probably just sitting on my dining room table. And this is very different than how my house functions today. In my house today, we don't have a den, we don't have a uh uh we don't eat in the kitchen, we use our formal living room and we use our you know formal dining room, if you will, as our everyday usage. But this was not my experience growing up. These were rooms that in my mind were kind of sacred and set apart, and uh even like the trim was different in those rooms. It was all wood trim and wood shutters on the windows versus the kind of the rest of my house was kind of IKEA looking and lots of white. And so on Christmas morning, we would go into this kind of unfamiliar room and we would sit on these white couches that we basically never sat on, and except for maybe when we had very formal company over, and we would gather around the tree and we'd pass out the presents, and we would go in age order and open each one of the presents. Each one of us would open a present at a time, and I don't recommend necessarily doing that because it creates definitely a feeling of like who has more presents when you run out, and maybe a sibling doesn't. But uh yeah, it it was it was a fine morning. I don't knock it at all. It got later and later as as kids got older and older and people wanted to sleep in. But by and large, it kind of looked probably like a lot of Christmas mornings. Uh, the Christmas mornings that you see on TV, Christmas mornings that you hear about in other people's homes. But then around let's say nine o'clock, ten o'clock, when we were a little older, we would have this experience of all the wrapping paper was opened, all of the toys were opened, all of the objects had been received, all of the thank yous had been doled out, and then what do you do? Christmas kind of goes from being this entire season leading up to this pivotal moment, Christmas Day, and then it just kind of goes away. And my mom's family, we'd visited usually with my mom's family on Christmas Day, but we didn't do that anymore because her mom and dad had passed away. My grandparents had passed away when I was pretty little. And so we really had nothing to do. And so we as a family sort of kind of developed a Christmas tradition of watching a Christmas movie or sometimes just a random movie in the den. But other than that, we didn't really have much in the way of a Christmas celebration. We had a couple of traditions, and I'll highlight one of them here in a moment. But by and large, that was the end of the day. And when I had kids of my own, I kind of fell right into that pattern. You know, Christmas ends at the time when the presents are done being opened, and you almost wait, you almost reset the clock, right? Till next Christmas. It's it's not the end of the holiday season because you still have New Year's, but but New Year's wasn't much of a holiday for me when I was a little kid. For little kids, it tends to be not that much of a holiday, although I'll do an episode on how you can celebrate New Year's with your kids too. I think it I think it's a really cool holiday to celebrate with kids, actually. But um, anyway, all of this to say, uh, this is what this episode is about. And that was super, super long intro. I probably should cut most of that. Sorry for the meandering and wandering through that. But I just wanted to give you a picture of what it looked like for me. And if it doesn't look like that for you, and you have traditions that you already do, uh, more power to you. Do those traditions. But I did not have a good sense of traditions that we did on Christmas Day. And as I've been a parent over time, we've started to bring in more traditions. And man, has it been it's completely rounded out the day. And what I've found is actually gift opening is no longer my kid's favorite part of the morning. It may be the most memorable part of the morning that day, but when my kids look back, they don't think about the gifts that they got in any given year. They think about the games that we played and the different things that we do. And so without further ado, I'm gonna give you my first one, and that is to have some sort of fun food thing that you do. And I don't mean a formal, you know, Christmas ham. For those who don't know, I'm a vegetarian, so I wouldn't want a Christmas ham anyway. But I'm not talking about bringing out a huge turkey or a Christmas ham. All of that is grown-up stuff. I'm talking about a fun thing for kids. And so for me growing up, and this was the one Christmas tradition that we always, always did in my family, and I've brought that to my new family and my my you know, with my kids, and my wife has taken that on and said, I love this. But for us, it was making Swedish pancakes for lunch. Uh, and if maybe that's it for you, Swedish pancakes or pancakes for lunch, or some chocolate chip pancakes or something. Uh, you can make cinnamon rolls. My wife does that as well. She really likes that. That's coming from her childhood. Or you can bake something as a family. You can have a hot chocolate bar with marshmallows and whipped cream and candy canes and all sorts of fun things. But whatever it is, make it a real kid-centric type thing, right? We're not, again, we're not talking about a formal dinner where they're going to be in stuffy clothes and stuff like that. I'm talking about lunchtime on Christmas Day, something that they like, whether that's Swedish pancakes, a syrup, and lingen berries, that's what we had, or whatever it is, or cinnamon rolls or whatever. I think this is one of the best things. And and and this goes all the way back to the earliest anthropological studies that we have on humanity. And what we know is that food has always been a central part, and cooking has always been a central part of what it is to be human. And that's because humans can only be humans. We only have the uh ability to have as many neural pathways and as robust of conscious cognition because we consume cooked food, where other species don't consume cooked food. Uh, other species can't cook their food. And the reason that we have been able to just absolutely blow those species out of the water, as far as cognition and cortical neurons, is because we can ingest so many more calories because we sort of pre-digest it. And that's kind of a weird way of saying it, but basically that's what's going on. We are when we cook food, when we put food together, we are pre-digesting it so that we can live another day and spend more of our time making relationships and having fun and doing all the stuff we're going to talk about today, and not slowly digesting bamboo or eucalyptus leaves or something. Uh, obviously, you know, so highly specific examples. I'm thinking about pandas and koalas today, apparently. But really, most species spend most of their time, most of their energy, I should say, most of their calories, just digesting their food. We don't do that. We uh do this thing called cooking. And so cooking has always been centrally important. If you grew up in any sort of ethnic tradition, you know the food that your family makes is central to your identity. That's why we make Swedish pancakes. It's kind of central to our identity, even though we're Swedish Americans. We've been in the United States for multiple generations at this point. I think that having some form of kid-friendly food be part of your day is is just a memorable piece. The smells associated with it, I mean the tastes associated with it, these are sensory building experiences. I really can just go on and on and on about this and how central food is in the building of traditions. But I think that you should do that. So, whatever that looks like for you, plan that with your partner, plan that with your kids, and say, hey, we're gonna do this. And he doesn't, you look, you can get it wrong the first year. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I would just make something and try and make an effort to make that a different day, not just a day when they're eating the same cereal or whatever they have every single morning. Um, make it a day when you do something a little bit fun. Uh, try and and kind of go above and beyond. It's a little bit more effort, right? It's actually a lot more effort, right? So I don't want to try and put too much on you, but that's what this episode is about. It's about what to do if you're done buying gifts. And by the way, this is your uh little PSA in the middle of this episode. I'm not gonna do, I thought about making this like a mid-roll, right? I actually interrupted myself, but I'm just gonna interrupt myself right now to say if you're listening to this around the time when it comes out, which is about about December 12th, halfway through December, understand that right now you've probably bought enough gifts for your kids already. If you're still still thinking about getting those extra few gifts or extra couple things, you probably don't need to. Instead, focus on some of the stuff we're talking about in this episode because I promise your kids are not gonna remember the 10th gift that you get them, or even the fifth gift that you get them. Maybe one or two they'll remember, but most of them they're gonna forget. They're gonna remember the rest of the stuff we talk about today. Okay, what's my number two? My number two, I actually have our three downloadable resources that I'm going to include in this episode. So you can go down to the bottom, you can click on the downloadable resource, um, and there'll be a link to it at the very top of the show notes. Usually I have a little description of the episode. The very top of the show notes, there's gonna be a downloadable link, and you can click on that link and give me your email and I'll shall send it to you. And it is actually an exact mapped-out thing that I'm gonna say here. I'm like trying to conceal it, like I'm not about to just tell you anyway, for free. But uh it's a mapped-out scavenger hunt that you can do with your kids because I think a scavenger hunt on Christmas is one of the best ideas ever. I got this idea, total transparency. I got the scavenger hunt idea from a social media video that I saw a couple years ago where this mom got on and was talking about how her family didn't have a lot of money growing up. And so they did a scavenger hunt for their presents so that they could extend the Christmas morning experience. Because if you're only opening one or two presents because your parents are poor, this was her words, not mine, then it kind of ends quickly and then you're disappointed. But her parents instead created these elaborate scavenger hunts. Often they would find uh wrapped fake presents where they're wrapped in newspaper and it wasn't really their present. It was another clue that would send them to the next clue and to the next clue. And they played these elaborate scavenger hunts to try and spread out Christmas morning. Well, of course, the kids, as this how it happens, the kids had no idea what was going on. The kids did not know that they were any different than other kids. They probably had some sense that their parents had a certain amount of money and maybe that how that compared to their friends, but certainly not that their Christmas morning experience was going to be deeply impacted by the fact that their parents were living paycheck to paycheck. And so they didn't even know why they did a Christmas scavenger hunt. They just knew that that had become a tradition. And after the family had this started one year when I think the dad had lost his job and the mom maybe had not gone back to work yet. And then the next year, the mom, the the dad was in a lower paying job, and so they did it again. But by the third or fourth year, when they probably could have afforded to afforded to get more uh presents for their kids, the kids had grown so attached to the scavenger hunt that they just kept doing it and doing it. And then this mom was now doing it with her kids. And she didn't know until very recently, when the video was published several years ago, that that this was the case and that this was all new to her, that this was actually because they didn't have enough money for enough Christmas presents in the mind of her parents. Instead, she spent her whole childhood with this memory or with these memories, that every Christmas it was an elaborate experience, and it wasn't just, you know, you get down there and there's a present under the tree and you rip it open, and you kind of whether you have gratitude for that or not is a whole another separate conversation. Maybe I should do my five tips for gratitude as one of my episodes coming up. Uh, now that I'm doing five tips episodes, but uh the what for for her that was just a really transformative experience. And so we started doing it with our kids, and let me tell you, it it is so fun. It it requires way more work than the typical, and you guys can hear, by the way, my cat. She got locked out here with me tonight, and I don't know what she's doing, but she's just meowing next to me. So if you hear a cat in the background, it's not your cat, it's my cat. Um, she's probably mad that the kittens are roaming around in the basement right now. She's not a huge fan of them. She wishes that they were not living in our house right now. Kind of like your kids, right? Sometimes your kids don't get along with their siblings, but you don't they don't have any control over who they live with. Neither does my cat. She has no control over who she lives with. Anyway, we started doing this a couple years ago, and now we actually do scavenger hunts more, even I don't know that we even did one last year because we had a family gathering to go to, and so we didn't have quite the same Christmas experience. But um, we do these more like on birthdays now. But my kids love this, they love the scavenger hunt, and so we're bringing it back this year, and I've we've already planned out our scavenger hunt, and my wife made a beautiful uh PDF thing on for you that you can use to just set up your own scavenger hunt. If you're already overwhelmed from the holidays and you just want to have a ready-made scavenger hunt, um, she's got one. So all you got to do is click that link below, let me know where to send it, and it'll shoot off to you in your email so that you can download it and print it and then uh and go through the scavenger hunt. But I cannot speak highly enough to making an experiential aspect of Christmas. And this, you know, this can be part of the opening presents, like I like I kind of alluded to in the in the example that I was originally inspired by. You could do this as like opening one of the presents, but you don't have to at all. Like it can be its own thing, or maybe your kids can do it together and it can be like a family present if you ever do that. My family did that growing up. We don't really do that in our family so much, but my family did that growing up. Like when we did get that first uh computer that sat in the living room, uh, that that computer was the f in the first place a family present. And so uh you can do that with a family present, but you don't have to. Again, these are all things that you can do in lieu of or after you're done, opening presents. All right, let me just take a little breather here. I'm moving pretty quick here. I gotta drink something, lubricate my throat. I just finished reading to my kids for a long time, so my voice is a little tired. Okay, number three, and this is another one that I probably could have a resource for. Just let me know. You know, send go to the little thing and send me a text at the bottom. If you're ever looking for the show notes, you can always send me a text, or you can DM me on Instagram or or TikTok or send me an email at podcast at wholeparentacademy.com and let me know if you want me to make a resource for this. But another thing that we did, and this was last year was the first year that we did this one, was what my wife calls minute to win it games. So think of like drawing a snowman on a plate while holding it on top of your head. A lot of people think of these as like bridal shower type games or or that type of thing. But these are small games, or or you see these featured a lot on social media. People record themselves doing these. Like unwrapping a present with oven mitts, things like that. Um those they're they're all things that they're quick games that you can set up that kids can do. Some of them work better or worse with kids. And honestly, I could make a whole episode just on these and how effective these are as building that family fun factor. Because these are these are really a hack for any time of the year. I just think that they're, you know, if Christmas has to be or the holiday season, whatever holiday you celebrate, honestly, any of these could be things that you do for Hanukkah, they could be things that you do for Kwanzaa, they could be things that you do for any holiday. Um, but these minute to win it type games are just things that your kids will do and they'll have fun doing it because they're non-competitive usually, at least the ones that I pick are tend to be not super competitive between the siblings. And so if there is competition, it's usually between the parents and the kids. And they just are ways that your kids will engage with this stuff and have fun. And man, after they do that, like it can be it just gets people laughing and enjoying their time. And as I've talked about over and over in episodes on siblings and things like that, the number one thing that you can do to raise positive sibling relationships is uh increasing fun and increasing the positive association and the neural pathways built around their siblings. And so if you can do that, if you can do a minute to win it type thing, um, it can be really, really awesome, right? It can be a great opportunity to just sit and or not sit, to get up and get moving and to to rest in that experience of the Christmas season. And like I said, if you if you want a an episode on all the minutes win it games of just like my I could do 10 minutes winning games as an episode of the podcast if you guys let me know that you want to see them. Um, but those those could be a really cool opportunity to just grow with your family, and and they can be on any night. This is way better than like sitting down and playing Monopoly with your family, or God forbid, sorry, the worst game to play with kids ever. I mean, Candyland and and games like that are generally speaking fine to play with kids. I mean, there is a winner and a loser, and sometimes that can create unnet unnecessary hostility. But like avoid at all costs games like sorry, where the point is to screw over your sibling and make them lose and cry about it and go, sorry, you know, what a terrible, terrible family game. I love it for adults, right? I love it for adults. You get together with some adults and have a couple of drinks and play sorry. Sure, why not? Uh maybe there's better games to play, but please, please, the people who are smiling on the cover of box cover of sorry are not actually happy. Uh those people are grimacing in pain as their kids want to tear each other's throats out. And so these are much better games than those. But yeah, things like you can Google these. I like I said, I can make an episode about this, but you can Google these. Um, Bow Battle is another one I just am thinking of as I'm sitting here. Everyone has bows on on their back and you're trying to take them off each other. Um, that that tends to be a little rougher one for kids who are a little bit older. You can uh try and wrap a person. That's a like a fun one to do. You can have two teams trying to wrap balloons, like any anything like that. That you again, these are all Christmas themed, but you can just do them about anything. It's really just getting your family going. And and you know what? If I will say some of these are really fun if you add a little bit of stakes with some with some cash. This is one of those places where I'd rather get my kids like one or two gifts that are uh meaningful to them and not spend a ton of money, and then in the minutes win at games, cough up five bucks to each of my kids as they win dollar bills doing stuff. I think that that's a much better way to use five bucks than to buy them an additional five dollar present that they're not gonna care about. Okay, moving along, uh, number four here, and this is kind of a combined one, uh you can do this one. I guess it's I'm really doing like more like seven, not even five. But I have this one split between either tell a story together or have them act out like a story, and I say like it's a Christmas story, but it doesn't have to be the Christmas story, right? If you're not religious and you don't want to act out the the nativity or something like that, it doesn't have to be. But you can have either your kids direct a puppet show or something like that, or a Christmas story with their stuffed animals or with each other, a Christmas play where they tell the story of whatever they want. They can just make it up, or you can kind of sit down if you have younger kids and do a Christmas story time together. This is kind of my example of a little bit what my family did in watching a Christmas movie. I just think with young kids, watching a Christmas movie often does not really uh it does it it doesn't always go well. I think it's better to like sit down. There goes my cat again, complaining at me. Um, it's often better to actually just do like a Christmas story. And so there's tons of holiday books that you can get from the library right now. And most likely, if you check them out now, they're not gonna be due back until after Christmas anyway. So everybody gets a blanket and a pillow, and you can all make a giant blanket fort or something like that if you want to. That's another one to do, right? Just turn your living room instead of having a formal living room where everybody is carefully passing out presents, turn your living room into a giant blanket fort and then dress up like a wizard and and read the stories of Christmas like this or something like that. Anything that you can do to just make it fun. You can go through a bunch of books, they can pick the books out, you could just tell a story. That's something that I do on on Christmas oftentimes. I'll just go, you know, I was thinking about this Christmas story, and I just make it up as I go, and I'll just tell a story. And sometimes this goes on and on and on, guys. Like, I'll tell a story on Christmas for like 45 minutes, an hour, right? Where I'm just telling you, and then I'll add them into it. Like, I'll include the kids' names and stuff like that. And and then they came upon a little boy who was sitting in the candy cane forest, and his name was Liam. And then Liam will be like, It's me, it's me, I'm in the story, I made it. I'm like, yes, yes, shh shh, I'll tell you what happens next. And then he died. No, I would never do that. I would never do that, I would never do that. But really, you can tell these like elaborate stories, and you don't have to do that. Like, that's just what I love to do. But just Christmas story time with your kids, or even them telling the story, putting on a play for you. This is another way to get them involved and get them active and get them up, or to get them down and chilling if you need that downtime. And this would be a great time, by the way, for another for one of the parents to go take a break, or to go do a nap with a kid, or to just, you know, go get that second cup or that third cup of coffee if your kid's got you up at 5 a.m. A lot of times on Christmas, we have more time to kill. Nothing's open. Uh, we don't have anywhere to go. It's not necessarily warm outside if you live in the Midwest or the East Coast or anywhere up north. Uh, you're you're it's gonna be cold. And then, you know, you also got up at 5 a.m. So, so you got a time to kill. Tell a 45-minute story, read 20 books from the library uh about Christmas. It's all really, really good stuff. Um, last two here, numbers four and five, right? Did I set four and five? Oh no, five and six. That's right, because I already did four. I told you I had a bonus one. My bonus one is really, really good. It's really a New Year's activity. I wanted to include it just in case I don't do a New Year's episode, but I'll go in more depth on it in the New Year's episode if I do that. But you can do it on Christmas as well. But okay, number five. This one is after dinner. This is like after in the evening. Um, Christmas is a a dark time, and I think that we should take advantage of this if we can. And what I mean by that is that darkness falls upon across the land very early in on December 25th. It's the you know, fifth darkest day of the year or something like that. Fourth darkest day of the year. And this means by four o'clock in the afternoon, many places in the United States, you are going to have some darkness. If you live up in Canada, you're one of my Canadian listeners, probably earlier than that, that it's going to be dark at you know three o'clock in the afternoon. And so, what can you do when it's before bedtime and it's dark? You can take a winter hike with your family. And I'm not talking about like getting on a hundred percent of your winter gear and going trudging out like it's this the Owl Moon story. It's a great book, by the way, if you're looking for a great Christmas story to read to your kids. I think it's Jane Yolin, who's just like a prolific writer. She's written for children, she's written for adults. She's like one of the greatest fantasy writers of all time because of the diversity of what she can do. But anyway, she wrote a book, I think, called Owl Moon, which I may be based on her own experience of going looking for owls with her dad in the middle of the night in the winter. But uh I'm not saying that you have to do that. This could be just like a Christmas lights walk. You could even do this in the car, right? Drive around and look at the Christmas lights. Everybody can vote on their favorite. You can drive around. I happen to live in like the one of the best Christmas lights areas of the country. Tinley Park, Illinois, where I live, has like some of the best, it's probably the best Christmas lights in in Chicago, are all or regularly in Tindley. There is a thing called the Great Chicago Light Fight, where uh people compete to have the most outrageous Christmas lights decorations. And I think like Tindley Park houses have won three out of the last five years or four out of the last seven years or something like that. So, so we have this a little bit better than than many people do. But you can even if it's just small displays, right? You can go walk around your neighborhood, look at the Christmas lights. And who had the best Christmas lights on our block? Who do we think? Was it us? Was it our house? Was it somebody else? Or you can drive around, like I said, listening to Christmas music, looking at those lights. Just something to do when it's dark. And it's special for your kids because kids actually spend very little time out at night. When they're going to bed at, you know, six o'clock, seven o'clock in the evening, they spend very little time out of the house when it's dark. And so this can be a special thing for them. And it's a memorable thing. And that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about making these traditions that make this time memorable. And I could have a whole episode. In fact, they do have an episode on the podcast from last year about how important traditions are. Whack when I was doing it in the other format, and I was doing the kind of more scripted out episodes with all this music in between and stuff like that. So you can go listen to that. Maybe I'll link it in the show notes if I remember. And then, okay, so we've we've gone through all of those. Um, this has been my cat has been really uh all over me. I intended for this to be a shorter episode, and yet here we are. It's probably going to be kind of the same length as the one yesterday and the one before that. But anyway, my last one, my bonus uh tradition that I think you should do with your family, even if you don't do this on Christmas, even if you don't celebrate Christmas, I think this is a great one to do for the new year, is record a 60-second family video. It doesn't have to be 60 seconds, I'm just giving you um uh, you know, a constraint because sometimes it's easier to do then. And you can just have your kids say it's kind of like rose and thorn for the year. What did you love this year? What happened to you this year? It's a digital Christmas card for yourself. And the reason why this was a such a cool one to do on Christmas or on New Year's is because this is something that then you get to save every year. And so you can watch your kids literally grow up as they say, like, what did you like this year? And they go from being like, candy, toys, you know, or what was your favorite part of this year? And then they tell you something that happened that day because they can't think back uh longer than that, to having, you know, middle school and high school kids who get really introspective with it. You know, hey, I I back in June I did this really cool play and that I was a part of, and that was like really special to me, or when I made this school team, or when I, you know, made this friend, or I mean, hey, if your kids are open with you, maybe it's really kind of intimate stuff. I would love to hear somebody tell me that their kid said, I had my first kiss this year, or something like that, you know? Um, but whatever it is, it's just an opportunity for you to get with your family. And we have a video of my wife's family doing this when she is really little. I mean, I I'm trying to think of how old she would have been. She'd probably been six years old when this when this occurred. And they recorded one of these on New Year's to Y2K, New Year's 2000. And I still think about it. I still think about how cute it is to see her and she has older brothers talk about like what they're excited for in the new millennia. And it ever since we've had that, we've we've been trying to do this, and we're we have not really been intentional about it. But when I was making this episode, actually, when we were talking about what we wanted to do on Christmas this year, and then that morphed into this episode, I was like, man, maybe we should just do it on Christmas. Because not all of our kids are really up for New Year's. Maybe we should just do this on Christmas. It's you know, it's only a week before the New Year. It doesn't really, it doesn't have to be for the exactly on New Year's Eve, right? It's not like some crazy amazing thing is gonna happen in the six days between uh Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. But this just can just be our opportunity to reflect and consider and look at like kind of like what we love this year. And you could do it as like, what did you love this year? What did you hate this year? That's okay. What are you excited about for next year? That's rose, thorn, and bud. That's an activity that we play with our kids every time we sit down for a family meal together. We say, What was your favorite part of the day? What was your least favorite part of your day? They they actually love saying, This is my the best part of the day, this was the this was my not like part of the day. It's my the my son Ollie said tonight at during our family meal when we were talking about this eating spaghetti. He was saying, This is the part of the not like part of the day. I'm my my not like part of the day was, and I think it was something about me being not nice or something. Um that was my son Matt's. He was like, When dad said this terrible thing, and it's so hard to hold your tongue in those moments and not go, I did not say that. Uh, this was a miscommunication, and I was trying to navigate this conflict with you and your brother. Instead, just validate the emotion, just go, yeah, yeah, you heard me, you heard me say that, and that was hard for you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that. But you can do this in the new year too. It doesn't just have to be something or or at the Christmas season, too. It's not just something that you can do when your kids are, you know, uh sitting around a dinner table. This can be a thing that you think about all year and actually record it. Like, like put it down. Make that video pro tip from a content creator, record it horizontally. It's gonna last way better. We experience the world in in you know, not uh in landscape mode, not in portrait mode. So understanding that you know, we experience the world in landscape, record these in landscape because I hope that we're not still consuming everything 25 years from now in portrait mode, uh, even though that's how I make all my videos for whole parent. Obviously, these podcasts are recorded in landscape because I hope they stand the test of time. I hope they're not just quippy little videos that come and go. And this is what I want for you. I want this to be a long-lasting thing. It does not have to be, don't put a lot of stress on it. Your kids can say whatever they want. Kind of the beauty of it is that you're not prompting them to say exactly what make it perfect. Nobody has to see this but you. I would recommend you don't post it on your social media. Keep this as something that you keep for yourself. Save this annually and just let your kids say whatever they're gonna say because whatever they're feeling and saying in that moment is a snapshot in time, and that's really what you're going for with this one. You're just trying to record a second in time. And your kids may want to watch this for the rest of the year. They may be excited to do it next year. Once you have a couple of these accumulated out, and like I said, we've not been diligent to do it, so I don't know this to be the case, but I just know my kids in general, and I'm telling you, I bet they're gonna love watching these when they're a little bit older. So I'm gonna do it this year. I hope that you'll join me doing it this year. I'm actually gonna try and do all of these things this year, and just to run down them one more time for you. This is we're at we're at the end of the episode, but I want to run through them. Uh, number one, do something with food. Do it for them. I I offered you Swedish pancakes. That's mine. Don't you don't have to do mine. Do yours. Uh, make cinnamon rolls, whatever, hot chocolate bar, ice cream sundae bar. I don't care what it is. Do something that makes sense for your family. Two the script the Christmas scavenger hunt. That's the link that's below if you want to get that. I my wife was kind enough to put that together. You can download that. I'll send it right to you. She puts together most of my really good aesthetic stuff. If you find something that I put out and it doesn't look very good, I probably made it. If it looks really good or it has beautiful illustrations, custom done, it's probably her. Uh, three, you can play games like minutes win at games, not games like board games and sorry. If you have older kids, you can play board games and things like that. I don't think that's a terrible idea. But um, with younger kids, do those quick games that are have quick wins. And this is a place where I, like I said, open your wallet a little bit, I think. Uh, throw, throw a couple bucks on the table. Doesn't have to be a lot. Like I said, I'm spending, I'm planning on spending about$15 total on giving my kids cash this year during those minutes winners games. I'm just gonna spread it out in dollar bills. I bet you they're gonna love it. Uh, number four, you can do the Christmas story time where you can have them tell you a story or you can make up a story. Just do storytelling. It's really important for kids anyway. It's good for kids. And you got nothing else to do on Christmas. Have this opportunity to just tell these fun stories. And you know what? It may become a tradition for you where you read the same books every year. You have those books that you really, really love. That was the Polar Express for me when I was growing up. A lot of people think of that as kind of a Gen Z thing because that's when the movie came out. But that book was really important to me when I was a kid. Uh, number five, do a neighborhood Christmas walk or a little hike through the woods if you want to do the Owl Moon thing, but go look at the lights, even if you're just driving around. We'll definitely be driving this year with a who will then be a 14-month-old. Um, she's definitely not gonna want to walk around out in the Chicago, probably 15-degree uh Chicago weather on that day. Although sometimes Christmas is a little bit warmer. We took a walk last year, wasn't during the evening, and we regretted it. We probably wish that we had done that differently. Uh, two years ago we did the lights, and that's what we're gonna be doing again this year. But you can do it however you want to do it. Obviously, this is your tradition, not my tradition. And last but not least, record that holiday video. Not because it's perfect, but because it's imperfect, because it's a snapshot in time, and you're gonna want to look back on it with your kids. Alright, that's what I got for you. It has truly been a wonderful life that I have lived. And uh yeah, I hope this helps you have just as wonderful of a life for you. See you next time. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. If you are listening to this right now, yes, you in your car driving somewhere on a walk with your kids, perhaps your kids are melting down and you're listening to this on your headphones with the noise cancellation turned on. Whatever you're doing while you're listening, doing the dishes at night after your kids go to bed, I don't know. That would just be me if I was listening. Stop right now. I have three quick favors to ask you. I promise, they're not gonna take. Very long. The first one, very, very easy. Go in to wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate it five stars. That's one, two, three, four, five stars. The more five star reviews that our podcast gets as we accumulate episodes, the more likely it is to be pushed out to more parents who are searching for parenting podcasts to solve their problems. Whatever you got out of this episode, whether it was something that to try with your kids, whether it was a new way to think about parenting, maybe this episode was not specifically about a problem that you're having, but you're somebody in your life who's having this problem. Go in and rate it five stars. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, that first one only takes you 10 seconds. If you have an additional 30 seconds, just type a few words for me to read. I'd love to read, I'd love to read the reviews. If there's something specific that's helped you, write it out. It helps me to know what we should keep doing here on the podcast, week in and week out. The second question that I have for you or request that I have for you, favor, let's call it, is to share this episode with somebody in your life who you think could use it. It might be a parent, another parent in your kid's class. It might be a sibling who has young kids. Maybe it's your kid's teacher or a faith leader in your life, whomever it is that you think should have this episode of the podcast or any episode of the podcast, send it directly to them. I know it's vulnerable to share podcasts with people who you might not have that close of a relationship with, or even more vulnerable if you do have a close relationship with them. But I promise you, so many of the people who listen to this podcast listened not because they followed me on social media, but because they got a personal recommendation from somebody in their life who said, Hey, this guy has a way of talking about parenting that just works for me. You don't know if they listen to it or not, they might never reply, but maybe, just maybe, they'll love the episode so much that they become your new parenting partner out there in the world, doing things the same way that you are, and you might have just made your new parenting bestie. The last thing that you can do is definitely the biggest ask for me, but it is to go over to Substack. That link is down below in the bio, and to subscribe so that these episodes can keep coming to you. Paid subscriptions on Substack is the only way currently that I am being funded here on the Whole Parent Podcast. That is the only money that I receive. It is$5 a month. I think that this podcast is worth the price of a coffee for you. If it's not worth the price of a coffee for you, obviously don't do it. But if you're extra cheap like me, you can just subscribe annually. I know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year. If you know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year, just give me 50 bucks up front, and then you don't have to think about it coming out of your credit card every single month. Those are the ways that you can support me. And as always, I think that you're a great parent already. But I do hope this episode gave you something to make you a little bit better. Take care.
