One of our favorite family Christmas traditions is to head out to see the festive lights. We load the kids in the van in their pajamas with hot cocoa and a bag of treats, blasting the “Polar Express” songs as we go. There is always a bit of scuffling and arguing in the back seat, someone always seems to have to go to the bathroom, we’ve even had kids throw up on occasion (total mom fail - filling up on treats on an empty stomach), but it’s the best!! This year I wanted to make it even more fun by making some cheerful Polar Express Tickets to announce our outing to the kids!

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Grab a print friendly version of these fun printable snack tags in our Freebie Resource Library HERE!

Aren’t these tags for the snack bags the cutest??!

I made a little section at the bottom of the tickets where they can check off what snacks they’d like me to have ready for our fun excursion to see the lights. I included hot chocolate, apple cider, chex mix, popcorn, candy canes and chocolate. Most years we also throw in a bunch of our homemade Christmas cookies (You can access our Christmas Cookie Catalog in our freebie resource library) to put in their snack bags.

A few years ago we realized we really needed to scale back our Christmas activities. We now hold a Christmas Family Council at the beginning of December (even better at the end of November) to see what family traditions are most important to our kids - old and new- and leave out the ones we’re not as excited about (for more about that, see this post). Doing our Polar Express Christmas Lights Outing always makes the cut, as well as our Christmas Movie Marathon. We plug it into our calendar to make sure it happens, and go on our merry way. It is so freeing to not hold on to those activities we only do out of tradition.

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