How to celebrate Christmas with your family: ideas and tips for a good day

Christmas is traditionally considered a family holiday. Most often, families gather around the table on Christmas Eve, and the hostess serves 12 meatless dishes and kutia. It is customary to give gifts under the Christmas tree on New Year's Eve, but many Ukrainians adopt Western traditions and prepare Christmas surprises.

Christmas is an ideal time for sincere conversations, joyful meetings and fun leisure. OBOZ.UA offers ideas on how to celebrate Christmas in the family circle to make it interesting for both adults and children.

Traditional Christmas

Every family has its own specialties that are usually prepared for Christmas. Fasting believers usually serve vegetable salads, potatoes, lean borscht, pickles, pastries without milk and eggs, nuts, honey, and fruit. But you can also cook your favorite dishes and delicacies: from mayonnaise salads to jelly or a birthday cake.

In the EU, goose baked with apples is often cooked. A traditional Christmas dish in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom is a baked turkey. You can also cook fish and duck in the oven, or try something original and buy seafood platters.

Making Christmas cookies

You can make a family tradition of making gingerbread cookies. They are decorated with white icing made from egg white, lemon juice, and powdered sugar. You will need 300 g of flour, 100 g of sugar, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, vanilla sugar, 150 g of butter, and 1 egg. Cut the butter into pieces and wait until it is slightly melted. Mix the flour, vanilla, sugar, and baking powder in a bowl. Then add the butter and mix with a fork or your hands. Then beat the egg into the dough. After mixing, the dough should be refrigerated for 1-2 hours. After rolling it out to a thickness of 0.5 cm, cut out the cookies with molds and bake for 10 minutes at 180 °C.

Christmas crafts and decorations

While the cookies are baking, you can organize a Christmas crafts competition. Children and adults will enjoy making Christmas decorations. There are many options: three-dimensional snowflakes, garlands, plasticine or paper figures. You can write a letter to Santa Claus. The joint leisure time will give you a sense of celebration, and the process of making them will bring you the warmest emotions.

Secret Santa

In a large family, you can start a secret Santa tradition. By drawing lots, everyone present pulls out leaves with the name of the person to whom they want to give a gift. If you choose a secret Santa for Christmas, it will be a great opportunity to get together on New Year's Eve to find your present under the tree.

Christmas movies

After the celebration, it's worth getting together with the whole family to watch a Christmas movie. OBOZ.UA published 6 best Christmas movies about love and family.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA also published an interesting Christmas game that will delight the whole family.

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