Magical Family Christmas Trips: Creating Holiday Memories Together
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you.
Family travel is at the top of our list when planning out our year. We love traveling with our 4 kids and really want to be able to give our children the experiences in life rather than more “stuff”. One of the most magical trips we have taken was at Christmas. The excitement, adventure and true quality family time made this a trip to remember and one of our favorites.
Get Your Kids on Board
We made the decision to tell our kids that we were going away for Christmas with plenty of notice. We did this because we would actually be gone on Christmas Day and not leaving after. This gave us the opportunity to tell our kids that the trip was part of the Christmas gift. Now some kids may react differently than others- for ours we did have to do a little bit of convincing. In our family Santa brings one gift, so for our younger kids they wondered would Santa still find them-which we assured that wouldn’t be a problem.
We planned out our time away with our kids so that everyone had something to look forward to. For this trip we drove to Florida and spent 10 days and then drove home. As with all of our trips we make the travel part of the trip. More on that below.
Planning
Even though I did not have to buy a ton of gifts we did still do stockings on Christmas morning and do a big Christmas dinner as we had a full kitchen where we were going. If you are driving on your trip be sure to pack as much in terms of groceries as you can. We were traveling from Canada so there are some restrictions so be mindful of this when planning. We packed all of our food in totes, these are great ones for travel https://amzn.to/4gBbfL9.
Its great to keep one in the trunk with the food for your destination and one full of snacks for along the way.
Our Christmas trip planning probably started in the Spring so I had a lot of time to prepare. For this year I created our own advent calendars rather than buying the ones from the stores. I did this on purpose so that the advent calendars were a part of the trip. These little bags work great https://amzn.to/4n7TiGw.
Leading up to our departure day the girls got cute stickers, or Christmas nail polish and festive clips they could where to school. And then closer to the trip I put the travel activities into the advent calendar, new markers, colouring books, fidget toys. These were just simple things I picked up that I knew I was already going to need for a long trip with the kids.
Then because we were driving to Florida and it would take 3 days each day they had something to open that would help to keep them occupied on that part of the drive. The best was white board markers- the kids used them on the windows and they wiped right off https://amzn.to/47V3Tjy!
Stay Festive
When we left on this journey we left after school on the Friday. The girls had pyjama day at school so they were already cozy and ready to go. They had little Reindeer antlers on to add to the Christmas fun.
We played Christmas music along the way and packed fun little Christmas outfits (though one of my kids chose to stay in the PJS). Along the way when we stopped at Hotels that were beautifully decorated for Christmas we were sure to take pictures.
We packed the Christmas books that we had so that we could hear traditional stories like we would have at home.
Each place that we visited on this trip had some type of Christmas decor and we were sure to admire all of it and enjoy all of the Christmas magic it added to our trip.
Christmas Morning
We kept Christmas morning the exact same as we would at home. We enjoyed appetizers on Christmas Eve- we read the Night Before Christmas and got everyone into bed. The stockings came out just as they would have at home with everyone having their stocking that was packed in the van for Christmas morning.
We made the same food on Christmas morning as we did at home, bacon, eggs and a family favorite Monkey Bread. We spent family time together and enjoyed swimming and enjoying Florida at Christmas Time
I hope that if you are considering trading all the gifts for a trip full of experiences that your Christmas travel is truly magical. For more family trip ideas be sure to check out our other posts at Blog – Together We Can Travel.
