Different Ways To Celebrate Christmas with a Toddler

It’s so exciting having a toddler at Christmas time. For many of us, it may be the first time spending Christmas with kids since we were kids ourselves. It’s just magical seeing their eyes light up when you mention Father Christmas coming and is a different experience to when they were babies and didn’t take an active part in the festivities.

At around the age of 2, children will start to understand a bit more what’s going on at Christmas time. They pick up on the excitement and look forward to getting presents from Father Christmas on Christmas Day. But how can we make the most of this time with our toddlers? I’ve compiled a list of different ways to celebrate Christmas with a toddler in the family.

Book a Santa Visit

Every year, we have one special Santa visit booked in. I’ve started to see that you need to start researching Santa experiences way before December if you want to get a day and time slot you’d like. I suggest looking in August/September. Do some research on local Facebook groups about which experiences in the local area were good last year and which ones would be suitable for your child’s age.

In the past, we’ve been on steam trains, visited a farm with llamas and this year a fruit farm. The steam train experiences were lovely but costly and more for me and my husband really. I don’t think the girls were as in awe as we were. They loved it just as much on the farms which were a more reasonable price.

A few Santa experiences I’ve seen have also included soft play in their price as they’re located at play centres with soft play. They have good reviews but I would just think they’d be so busy at that time of year so it’s put me off booking those.

Go and See some Christmas Lights

Reach out on local Facebook pages and ask for recommendations of streets near you where they have good light displays. Our road is actually not too bad this year. Each year, it gets better and better. We still have an inflatable Santa down the road which you can see from our house. He’s been up for years and is sometimes facing the house, sometimes trying to escape down the garden. Our girls love spotting where he is as he’s never facing the way he should be!

We went out about 5pm one evening in the car and we did a circle around our local area. We even stopped round the corner from one house and hopped out to go and have a photo in front of it as their display was just amazing.

You can also find big light trails popping up around the UK in the weeks before Christmas and they sometimes continue after Christmas Day too. A local National Trust had a free one which sounds amazing except that there was heavy rain in the week before Christmas so they had to close their overflow car park meaning paring became and issue and we didn’t want to go there earlier to make sure we got a space but then have to hang around in bad weather until the sun set and the lights came on. It was a shame to miss it but it would have been cold, wet and maybe even a wasted journey so this year our free light trip was a definite winner.

Decorate Cookies or A Gingerbread House

My four-year-old has a love of decorating gingerbread houses though she doesn’t actually like eating gingerbread so it’s all about the decorating in this house. I saw a hack this year about super-gluing the house together which I though was an amazing idea because I’ve also never been tempted to eat a gingerbread house anyway as they’ll have been out for hours/days before being eaten anyway.

The kit we got this year was for a tiny gingerbread house and the icing was a bit suspicious. It was really hard to squeeze it out of the tube even after massaging it so if we were to do it again, I’d buy some royal icing and mix it with water to make our own icing. I did try making my own gingerbread house before but it just fell to pieces so I think we’ll stick to buying a pack and add our own icing.

The girls enjoyed themselves even when I ended up doing the majority of the icing, because they got to put the sprinkles on where they wanted. Possibly in years to come, they can each have their own gingerbread house.

We enjoyed making cookies this year too. My mum bought our girls a cookie baking set so we just had to add water or something to the mix and it made the dough. This is simple but I do prefer proper homemade biscuits as I wasn’t too impressed with the taste of these packet mix ones. The girls had fun decorating them with a mix of icing sugar, food colouring and water with some sprinkles on top. We used our stash of Chrismtas cookie cutters – the set came with an elf one, we also had Santa, Christmas trees, an angel and stars among others. The girls enjoyed using the rolling pin too.

Go Shopping for Gifts for Teachers/Childminders/Nursery Nurses

I think it’s a really nice gesture to show your appreciation to the adults who work with and help your children so we always buy gifts for our kids’ teachers.

So far we’ve done gift bags of wine, chocolate and a bath/shower item. This year, I also got them a personalised tote bag which looked so cute when they arrived. I like for my daughters to choose the chocolates for the adults themselves. It makes it more personal for them than me just buying the items and handing them over.

Read Christmas Stories

I have to admit I do have a slight addiction to buying kids’ Christmas books from charity shops. It also seems that our family and friends think Christmas books make great gifts too so we have a rather large collection of them. I’ve had to start paring them down this year as we are just overwhelmed with them. Added to the fact that I had reserved some Christmas books from the library this year too so it was a full bookshelf of Christmas books.

We read at least two books a day with our girls. Those two are at bedtime, but throughout the day, we might read something too, it depends on whether they want to. But bedtime is a non-negotiable and they love having stories read to them then as it’s part of our routine.

Our favourite toddler Christmas books this year have been:

Where’s Father Christmas?

You can buy personalised Christmas stories that will hopefully be brought out each year. I remember having my own Christmas book with my name in and feeling so special.

Websites like Wonderbly, Not On The High Street and Etsy all have lots of different stories to personalise.

Do Christmas Crafts

You can find little Christmas kits in places like The Range and The Works. Our 2-year-old loves colouring too and there are loads of colouring pages accessed for free on the internet.

This year, we visited our local library for a craft session, The librarian had cut out a snowman and the girls glued it onto a piece of card, putting his buttons, scarf, nose etc in the right place (or wherever they felt like it!) and then they did some colouring. They really enjoyed that. It didn’t matter that our two-year-old’s snowman wasn’t perfect. I wanted it to be hers, not mine.

Find Free Local Events

We have done a handful of free local Christmas events this year and you can do this with your toddlers too. It just takes a little bit of research and keeping your ear to the ground about events coming up.

One of the best free events was seeing Santa, helping his elf with a Christmas song and stacking presents. The experience only lasted half an hour but the children got a certificate and a chocolate lolly for taking part. It booked up quickly when it was announced and was a nice little thing to do with a toddler. If that had been our only visit to Santa this year, that would have been fine because Santa doesn’t always need to give presents before Christmas as he delivers them on Christmas Eve after all.

The craft acitivty at the library mentioned above was free and the light trail above was free too.

Drink Hot Chocolate

My two-year-old has little cups called Baby Cups and I put some hot chocolate in one of those, we blew on it and then she drank some. She really liked it. I didn’t give her marshmallows as they aren’t recommended for little ones due to being a choking hazard.

So now whenever I have a hot chocolate, she gets a little one too.

Obviously always make sure it’s not too hot for your little one.

Different Traditions with Toddlers

In the UK, many people put a stocking out for Father Christmas on Christmas Eve. Then, during the night, the children’s stockings are filled and when the children get up in the morning, they get to open their gifts. There may also be presents under the Christmas tree too.

Our four-year-old decided this year that she didn’t want her stocking put on the end of her bed as she’d be too excited to sleep knowing that Father Christmas was coming into her room. So, instead she asked to leave her stocking outside her door. This is much easier to do so we definitely agreed to that! Our two-year-old was so cute walking up the stairs to put her stocking outside the door.

Some families give their children Christmas Eve boxes with activities, pyjamas and a film inside. We don’t do this as any Christmas pyjamas will have been worn on and off since the beginning of December as I like to get some wear out of them. We also don’t have time to watch a film on Christmas Eve as we usually see family then plus our two-year-old would not be interested in watching a whole film.

Some families do North Pole Breakfasts. I tried this last year but all my effort fell flat as no-one else really ate anything I made. My then three-year-old is a fussy eater anyway so just wanted her usual breakfast so I decided this tradition doesn’t work for our family at this time.

A tradition that we have done with our daughters is having two elves come and visit for Christmas. They arrive on December first and go home to Santa on the 24th December. Our elves are kind elves and either set tasks or just hide. It was easier to do tasks when I was on maternity leave but now I’m back at work, just having them hide is enough. Some families’ elves cause mischief but I feel so sad for some kids as their parents take it too far and make their children cry with the elves’ antics and I don’t find it funny making kids cry.

Pantomimes are a traditional show at Christmas time but we’ve not ventured into one as a family yet. They cost a fair bit and I don’t want to turn up with my toddler who may not be in the mood and then not enjoy it. So we’ll leave visiting a pantomime until they’re a bit older. I’d also worry they wouldn’t be able to see anything from their seats too.