Family Christmas Movie Nights

If you know me at all personally you know that I love Christmas. I try and make the Christmas season as fun and memorable as I can for my kids. 

A few years ago I started thinking of different ways I could do just that. Along with my love of Christmas comes my love for Christmas movies. So why not have family Christmas movie nights.

Movie Nights

I start planning our movie nights in late September you know right after the kids go back to school and the house is quiet. I use this time to plan not just the movies but I also to make a quiz or have a game to go along with the movie.

Because I have so many  Christmas movies that I love to watch, our Christmas movie nights start in November, and some nights we will have two movies.

This year we will have a total of 11 movies with the very last one being Polar Express.

I decided to have my family help me with picking what movies we would watch. I made a list of our movies and each family member would rank the movies from favorite to least favorite.

After everyone picked how they ranked our movies I decided what movies we would use, plus I added a couple of new ones to our collection this year.

I printed up a calendar for both November and December and wrote what movie would be showing on that night.

We will kick off our family Christmas movie nights with my husband's all-time favorite, Nation Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

  I have to say it ranks number two with me as well, who doesn't love some good old Griswold family vacations.

A letter to the happy three

My kids love to get letters in the mail, so I printed up a letter to each one of the happy three inviting them to our family Christmas movie nights.

In each of the letters, I send out tickets for each movie night. You can find where I found the tickets on my Christmas board on Pinterest. In the letter, I include the date and what movie will be playing.

We do have a couple of rules for movie nights. The first is the best pajamas that they have, the second is they must bring their ticket in order for them to watch the movie and the final one is no devices.

This is the first year for that, last year I watched my older two play around on their phones. I thought that it took away from family time, so phones are banned.

Dinner to go along with the movie

Dinner is also included in our Christmas movie nights. The kids have always loved to eat dinner in front of the tv, and that is just what we do for our movie nights.

Some of our dinners are themed to go along with the movie like for Home Alone we have pizza and ice cream sundaes for dessert.

I made these cute Elf treat bags to be filled with their snacks for the night we watch Elf. My youngest stayed home sick a few weeks back so I had her help me do these.

First, we cut a strip of yellow paper for the belt. Then we made the belt buckle using the Cricket square shape and placed these cute black sticker buttons on.

I think I will fill them with some popcorn from our local popcorn factory and a little candy.

Making it even better

To make the family Christmas movie nights even better, I make up quizzes to go along with the movie. The family member that gets the best score on the quiz will get a small gift.

Then on our last movie night, I have a total of who won the most quizzes and that person will get a gift.

Since we have done this a few years now I have had to change things up. Last year we did some games to replace a quiz. Pinterest has some great ideas for games, and that is where I found the saran wrap ball game.

I'm planning on doing this again this year, I have been thinking about how to make it harder. The answer is some kind of tape I believe.

Another game I did was, I wrapped a gift box (they got a new Christmas movie) using tons of tape. Then gave them a Rudolf nose and oven mitts.

They had a set time to put on the nose and oven mitts and try to open the gift.  It was the most fun thing to watch. My oldest figured out if the box was punched then they could grab the wrapping paper easier.

This year I bought a cylinder gift box, I'm hoping this will be a little harder for them to punch.

Happy Family Memory Making ~ Jenny

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