Season's Greetings! Favorite Christmas Traditions from PFP

We'd like to share with you some of our team's favorite Christmas traditions.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Steve Martin ~

Our family’s most treasured (and fun) tradition is "The Smashing of the Peppermint Pig"!

For the past 40 years we have been faithfully following this joyous ceremonial process – which has become the highlight of Christmas dinner and related festivities.

"In Victorian culture, the pig represented good health, happiness, and prosperity. When families gathered together at Christmas for the holiday meal, the tradition was to break the Peppermint Pig after dinner (inside a small cloth pouch) using a miniature hammer. All family members would then share in eating the sweet candy pieces, hoping for good fortune in the coming year."

After Christmas dinner, we place the small candy pig into the velvet pouch and begin the ceremony. Using a small metal hammer, each person at the table gives the pink porker a whack and shares a story of their good fortune from the past year. On the second time around, everyone shares a hope they have for the coming year. After two rounds, we empty the sack and the piggy pieces are shared by all – in hopes of a wonderful new year.

Dallas Scoffield ~ One of my favorite Christmas traditions we do is have a massive baking day. We all work together while listening to Christmas music. We make two kinds of homemade fudge, homemade caramels, dipped pretzels, almond joys, chocolate toffee, peppermint bark, and more! Then we pile high all of the goodies on plates and deliver them to our friends and neighbors!

Jessica Robinson ~ We have a big Christmas dinner with all 4 of our girls and their families a week before Christmas. The cuisine and decorations change every year based on the country we choose. Each family brings a dish and a dessert they feel represents the country and its heritage. This non-traditional Christmas meal breaks up the monotony of the typical Christmas eats we all tend to get a few times over the course of a month (through office parties, other relatives get togethers, etc.). While most of the time the grandkids enjoy trying something unique from other cultures, we do keep a back-up of pizza or hot dogs for them in case it's needed 🙂.

Jendra Tillman ~ Most of our family traditions came about from my daughter’s need to have things happen in an orderly way. Here are a few of our traditions:

1. Start listening to Christmas music on November 1st.

2. Buy special ornaments to commemorate events that occurred that year. This year includes a shell from our New Year’s cruise to the Bahamas, a Mickey Mouse ornament from our trip to Walt Disney World, and a Grinch ornament for the one event we wished had never occurred - COVID.

3. Leave Santa Brianna’s favorite cookie – Oreos.

4. Have biscuits and gravy for breakfast.

5. One new tradition we started this year was a Christmas tree decorated to honor my late husband.

Lydia Staggers ~ One of my favorite Christmas traditions revolves around one of my favorite pastimes - reading beautiful literature to my children. When my firstborn was a baby, he received several Christmas books from a beloved aunt. The following Christmas, I bought him a new children's Christmas book and let him unwrap it on Christmas Eve. The next year, we took out his growing collection and read through it during the month of December. Each Christmas following, I purchased a new Christmas book for my growing family, and the wonderful tradition continued. After Thanksgiving, I would pull out our collection and place it in a basket in the family room. Each child could then pick a book to read or re-read each day. Some years I even created a fun advent calendar and put the book titles on slips of paper that I randomly placed in the little advent boxes. It was a fun surprise to see which book(s) we would end up reading that day.

Now that my kids are teens and young adults, they think they're too "old" to be read to - but I sneakily rotate our collection on the coffee table, and sure enough, they pick up those beloved old friends and read through them. A few of our favorites include Redheaded Robbie's Christmas Story, The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, William Joyce's Santa Calls, the ever popular Polar Express, and the hysterical novel, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (which would take more than a day to read). I cannot wait to continue the tradition with my grandchildren - hopefully someday!