My Christmas traditions

Les traditions de Noël! We all have certain family traditions for Christmas, right? Your Christmas traditions may be similar to mine or quite possibly the same, but I’m sure there are some traditions I have that are completely different to yours! But that doesn’t matter: it’s what makes your Christmas special and unique to you and your loved ones. In this post I thought I’d share with you five of the Christmas traditions we have in my house.

For others your traditions may be the same or quite similar, or maybe they find them a little strange and a little different to Christmas but that doesn’t matter! It’s what makes your Christmas feel special and unique to you and your loved ones, right? My family and myself have plenty of Christmas traditions, so let’s start off with the first one shall we? Alors, la première tradition est:

Putting up the Christmas decorations on the first Sunday of Advent.

At mine we put up all of our Christmas decorations on the first Sunday of Advent, which is usually the last Sunday of November. I don’t know about you but it seemed as if this year, so many people were putting up their decorations so early! Maybe it was because we were all stuck in yet another national lockdown, and we ran out of things to keep us busy but I decided “you know what? We’ll just wait until Advent starts”. Mind you, we didn’t even get to put up the Christmas tree on that Sunday because to our surprise, we had half a Christmas tree! So this year, everything went up a little late but that’s okay! Better late than never, right?

We have a dress code on Christmas day

Now, you may enjoy spending Christmas chilling in your pyjamas or wearing a cosy Christmas jumper but I come from a Congolese household and so we will dress up at at any given opportunity, including Christmas day! Each year we have a colour theme so everyone has to dress according to that colour! We’ve done white, green, red, blue… last year theme was black which I know isn’t the most festive of colours, but we made it look elegant and glamorous as always. This year’s theme is a little different but, you’ll find out what it is from the snaps I take so stay tuned.

Late Christmas dinner and opening presents > Christmas lunch and presents in the morning

On Christmas day we all have a massive lie-in. There is no-one who in my house who likes to get up really early in the morning to prepare the Christmas dinner. Well, no-one is a bit of an understatement: my mum is the only one who wakes up early and by that, I mean she’s up at like 10:30/11AM. I feel like we’re the only people on our road who opt for having a late Christmas dinner. Besides, we have to wait for my sister and her kids to come over so that we can all open our presents together and then hit the dinner table, and my sister loves a lie-in (don’t we all?). So while you’re probably watching your third Christmas movie of the day, we’re probably trying to rush everyone downstairs to the living room so that we can all open our presents.

Yeah… We don’t eat turkey

No-one likes turkey in my house so, why bother cooking something that no-one is going to touch? I mean alongside the roast potatoes, the yummy vegetables and the gravy we’ll have chicken, pigs-in-blankets, some oxtail and everyone’s favourite: NTABA (BBQ smoked goat and lamb) which we have in abundance. But no turkey, and we’re completely fine with that.

We all sit down and watch Eastenders

When I was younger my mum, my sisters and myself would always watch Eastenders every time it was on. But of course, as the years have gone by we’re all got really busy and we’re hardly all home at the same time, so we don’t have time to watch Eastenders together. Christmas day is the only time we are all together at the same time and the same place, and so we watch Eastenders. But I’ll be honest, sometimes we have no idea what’s going on: who’s with who, the new family on the Square, who owns the Queen Vic… you get the gist. It’s funny but at least we have that moment together, and it’s very special to us.


I’d love to hear about some of the traditions you and your family have during the Christmas period, or even any traditions you have with your friends! For example, every Christmas I spend the day in Central with my secondary school friend who moved to Switzerland when we were in year nine! Unfortunately, that won’t be the case this year but fingers crossed we’ll have a double meet up next year… we’ll see. But enough about me, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below with some of your favourite traditions during the Christmas season.

I know it hasn’t been an easy year for many of us, but what’s great about the Christmas season and the family traditions we all have is that it brings us all together and makes us appreciate the time we do spend with one another. T’is the season to be jolly and t’is the year to be grateful for what we have. A bientôt mes chatons et je vous souhaite un très bon week-end !

Bisous bisous!

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