One of the best parts of growing up is taking the traditions you had when you were a kid and adapting them to your new grown up life. John and I have a couple of our own traditions that we started a few years back when we started living together (like gifts to each other from the cat, and Christmas dinner at our favorite Chinese place) and my family had a lot of awesome traditions when I was a kid that I love that John is now included in. My favorite tradition was the Elves. No, not an elf on the shelf…Elves.

Our parents started this tradition when my sister and I were little. I don’t even remember the first year it started, so it had to be when we were really young. Christmas eve night we’d say good night and be preparing for bed. We would be in the middle of brushing our teeth or bickering about what to watch on TV before it was time to go to sleep when the doorbell would ring and the dog would start howling (she hates the doorbell).

“WHO’S THAT AT THE DOOR??” Mom would call up the stairs to us (our dad was always suspiciously missing around this time…). Kacie and I would stop bickering and immediately try to beat the other person down the stairs. One of us would open the door, cold air would come rushing in, and we’d each find an early Christmas gift Santa’s “elves” had dropped off on our doorstep for us to open early.

When the elves first started visiting our house they’d leave us things like Christmas pajamas and sometimes socks or slippers too. One exception was a Christmas I will always remember…the year of the big ice storm. Power was out everywhere. It didn’t come back on for days and days. It was so cold inside of our normally toasty house that I wore a coat to bed and still shivered as I fell asleep. That year the elves left us both a Campbell’s soup gift set with a funny ceramic soup mug with the little Campbell’s soup girl on the front.  Soup was such a welcome sight after such a cold few days!

In 2007 I moved out into my own bachelorette pad after starting my first “REAL” job and I worried that the elf gifts would stop. I know it’s silly and a grown person who lives on her own shouldn’t be sad about things like this, but I’m a very sentimental person and it doesn’t really take much to make me cry (just ask John haha). I don’t remember what the elves brought us that year (at some point they started bringing Ulta gift cards…HOLLA), but I do remember how it felt to get that gift and know that even though life could sometimes be rough, I was still my parents’ little girl and nothing would change that.

The past few years the elves have continued to visit us on Christmas eve. These days they aren’t waiting until we’re headed to bed, which I’m assuming is because we keep much later bedtimes now that we are adults and can stay up as long as we want. The elves don’t have all night to sit around waiting for us to go to bed…they have toys to finish for crying out loud! We also don’t live at home anymore, so they probably don’t know where we live. Instead they visit us while we’re all at my mom’s house eating dinner on Christmas eve. The best part of this is that they now bring John gifts on Christmas eve too! No, not an Ulta gift card (though I could definitely take that off of his hands if the elves accidentally gave him one of those too…). It means a lot to me that my parents the elves have welcomed John into our family as not just my husband, but as a son too.

This tradition means so much more to me than my parents could know. Now that I’m an adult I know that it’s more than just a gift on Christmas eve…it’s how much my parents love us and the silly things they do (and have done) to make us smile and let us know that they care:)

So, because I can’t give all of you an elf gift, instead I’m sharing with you my Spotify Christmas playlist! I LOVE music, especially a lot of alternative/indie stuff, so my Christmas playlist definitely has some out of the ordinary tracks! You can find it by clicking this link🙂 AND you need something good to drink while you’re listening to the playlist, so I’m also going to give a 10$ Starbucks card to one lucky commenter! Just comment with your favorite Christmas tradition! Check back on Friday for the winner!