Homestead Creations

One goal we set as a family this year was to celebrate more. To be more aware of all of our blessings and celebrate them, give awareness to them and give thanks for them. I thought it would also be fun to celebrate all the silly national and international holidays. I looked up national holidays and made a list for each month of the ones I thought we might celebrate. Then, while at Frys, I saw this calendar that has a holiday for every day of the month and we got it; a lot of them are repeats, but it also helped us add more to our lists. I found the calendar on Amazon so you can purchase it HERE if you are interested. We definitely don’t celebrate all of them, but even if we don’t do anything for it, we have a good laugh over reading what is that day.

Above is the list of holidays I had planned on celebrating, it doesn’t include the additional holidays/celebrations we got from the calendar. We “celebrated” most of them, but I was not good about getting pics each time. In fact, I was pretty bad at it.

Some fun celebrations in January that we didn’t get pics of:
Houseplant Appreciation Day. What did we do? Dusted our house plants :). Ok, so I liked this one and the kids, not so much, but they were good sports.
National Cheese Lovers Day – we had a cheese spread and tried some new flavors
For February, I had things planned for Groundhog Day but we never ended up getting to them so I filed them away for next year. We did however celebrate:
Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day – obvious what we did here and it was a fun treat
Kite Flying Day- not a windy day (we don’t have too many here) do a kite craft instead!
Guitar Day- Cam’s favorite day, she played a lot of songs and we sang
Muffin Day- great excuse to go get some Costco muffins
Strawberry Day- chocolate dipped strawberries for the win

Here are some of the celebrations we actually remembered to take pictures of:

National Trivia Day was fun. We got these cards at the souvenir shop at Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage, in Tennessee. I found some trivia cards on Amazon that look pretty fun. Ok, so not all of them are trivia per say but they look fun and close enough 🙂

Chinese New Year was a fun one too. We ate “Chinese” food, I say Chinese food loosely because it was very Americanized :). We read facts about Chinese New Year: why the celebrate it, what some of the traditions are and why, etc. The kids made a paper dragon and we made dessert sushi to finish the festivities.

Lego Day and Puzzle Day are two obvious ones to celebrate because we already do them regularly at our house but yay for an excuse to do more of them!

Tater Tot Day was one from the calendar that we added because…well, we got to eat tater tots.

Valentine’s Day for most will be a smaller event/holiday but it’s a BIG DEAL in our house. I have always been a huge fan of a day where you celebrate all the love in your life and all the ones you love most. This year, we took it a step further by starting a new tradition: we don’t exchange gifts at Christmas, instead focusing on giving to others and doing service, and then exchange sibling gifts and gifts from parents on Valentine’s Day. We told the kids we would try it for a year and see how everyone felt about it. Everyone whole heartedly agreed after Christmas that we were a fan of this new tradition. Then Valentine’s Day, or Kissmas as many in our family now call it, and it sealed the deal for us. We loved a day of celebrating each other without taking away from the focus of Christ at Christmas. Win/win for us and we’re officially making it the new norm for our family.

Sticky Bun Day was another one that came from the calendar and boy are we glad we added it to our list! You have got to go make a bath of THESE sticky buns. They are SO easy and SO delicious!

Here are some of the holidays/celebrations coming up for March & April:

Most of these are pretty obvious how you would “celebrate” them, but for some of the less obvious ones, here are some ideas:

Middle Name Pride Day- discuss why they each of the name they have and why. We named each of our children’s middle name after a family member we admire so this was an obvious one for us to celebrate
K9 Veterans Day- I plan on having the kids watch this video to learn more about our K9 friends
Scribble Day- google “scribble art” and the ideas will come to you
Something on a Stick Day- how many things can we eat on a stick? Corndog, popsicle, kabobs…etc
National Find a Rainbow Day- if luck is on our side and its a rainy day maybe we’ll chase a rainbow and go for a drive but if not, I plan on doing a rainbow craft with the littles. When life doesn’t give you a rainbow, you make one!
National Pet Day- spoil your pet! Don’t have a pet? Spoil your friend’s/neighbor’s or make these easy tshirt dog toys and donate to your local pet shelter or vet.
National Laundry Day- is there a better excuse to finally teach your child to do their own laundry?!

I hope these inspire you to put a little more fun into your day to day life without making things anymore complicated. This has been so fun so far because they take so little effort to do (most of them) but have added so much fun, laughter and enjoyment into our busy schedule, and we really hope it will do the same for you!

xo,
Jenny