My favorite tradition is having our elf join us! One of the reasons is because we have never changed his name. I got him three years ago and we picked the name Jack. Ever since then I have just introduced him as our elf Jack. What’s awesome about him keeping his identify year to year is that the older siblings remember Jack really well and they tell their siblings all sorts of stories about him! So they share this connection throughout the family with our elf. Parents come in and keep asking “Who is Jack?” and they giggle a bit when they see him 🙂
Our elf always writes these teeny tiny letters too! I bought a punch on Amazon that makes these tiny envelopes and I write letters with the smallest size font I can find. I then hide them in our day’s read aloud and act shocked when the letter falls out of the book. The kids eat it up!
He sends us little goodies like these gingerbread cookies. I made them myself and they weren’t very good, but the kids really loved them. This year Jack will be buying them instead 🙂
And then we have our Christmas gifts. One of the gifts I like to make are these ornaments. Totally not my idea! I found this idea online a few years ago. It originally said to use transparency sheets but the kids were hard to see so I went with regular copy paper and it worked really well. I also bought some fake snow to put in the ornament.