This weekend we started our second annual Christmas Jar. I first heard of Christmas Jars last year from Tasha, a fellow twin mom and blogger. She uses the jars to keep Christmas centered on making memories as a family. With our boy/girl twins only being 18 months old last year, I was skeptical about how the Jar might work, but I liked the idea so much that we just decided to start simple and see what happened. Here I share our first Christmas Jar experience so you can see how we started and how this idea can even work with toddlers!

The holidays are always hectic, especially when you are a mom of multiples! We decided that we would keep the activities for the Jar confined to things we could do on the weekend instead of every day. With three weekends until Christmas, we picked six simple activities. I wrote each activity on an index card and made a plain glass jar look a little more festive.

On Saturday, Emily drew our first activity: making muffins.

We were a little busy with a Christmas party on Saturday, so we ended up making muffins on Sunday, which went along perfectly with Drew’s draw: making a craft.

Surely, we could find a way to do both of these activities on a Sunday afternoon. After some Sunday morning Pinterest browsing, I came up with two cool ideas for muffins and crafts.

We started with flax apple muffins. (To my husband- I have now used the flax twice. You know, the flax you swore I’d never use. You lose the bet.)

While the muffins were baking, we tried to dirty the rest of the dishes in the house started on our family craft: salt dough hand prints.

I’ll add the rest of the bows to the ornaments tomorrow. After muffins, ornaments, a casserole, and the clean- up, this mama is tired!

But happy.

This year, with two and a half year old twins, our activities for the jar have evolved to keep up with their energy and attention spans. Our first two activities this year are watching a Christmas movie and reading a Christmas story. Other options included: going ice skating, driving around to view Christmas lights, visiting a live nativity, making a Christmas craft, baking Christmas cookies, and pulling a name from the Angel Tree.,

The choice of activities matters less than the fact that these are opportunities for you and your sweet family to slow down and make memories together.

What are some of your favorite ways to make memories at Christmas?