Christmas Traditions

I don't think any of our Christmas traditions are very unique, but they are ours. We always make a gingerbread house, not on any certain day, but sometime before Christmas. On Christmas Eve before we go to bed, we sing some Christmas carols together and read the Nativity story from the Bible and act it out. The past few years we have also watched it on DVD. Then the kids get to open one present. This was a tradition in my family growing up. We leave out milk and cookies for Santa by the fireplace where the stockings are hanging. In the morning we enter the family room together and everyone finds their stocking and present from Santa on one of the couches. This is also carried over from my childhood. After everyone has looked at everything in their stocking we start opening presents from under the tree. We start with the youngest and go to the oldest opening presents one by one taking turns and playing with new toys in between. Nikolay goes out to but things for my stocking usually the night before and for the past few years I have asked him to pick up some more candy from the store for the kids, and he has come back with some funny stuff. Like, he knows that I like gum, so one year he bought a huge assortment including some weird energy gum and vitamin gum. And he got one pack of gummy worms two years ago, and that is not something you can divide between 3 kids (at the time) very well, so we just put it in Adriana's. It was a huge hit and she shared with everyone and for the whole year she talked about how Santa brought her gummy worms, so he brought her more the next year, maybe it will be a new tradition now. Another tradition that we have is giving each of our kids a unique Christmas tree ornament each year. I'm not sure if it is a tradition, but Grandma Svetlana always spends the night on Christmas Eve and this year she is flying out from Utah to be with us for Christmas too. For a few years we went Christmas caroling on Christmas Eve like I used to growing up, but haven't been able to for the past 3 years due to Ariel being sick. Maybe we'll start that tradition again. In our extended family for a few years all of us sisters exchanged Christmas ornaments, but that has kinda died out. All of the cousins do a gift exchange, which is fun. Traditionally we take a family picture and send it out with Christmas cards. I would like to start an advent calendar, but i am not up to making one for this Christmas. Maybe next year.
Update: after reading Jessica's comment, I remembered another tradition that we just started last year. Some friends of ours had a Christmas Mouse that visited their house from the beginning of December up until Christmas Day to make sure the kids were being good and report back to Santa. His name was Cheddar. A different Christmas mouse magically appeared at our house shortly after that. His name was Monterey Jack, but in a not he asked us to call him Jack for short. He came in a little Christmas tin shaped like a house and the girls would leave notes for him. Every morning he would be hiding in a new spot, always out of reach from the children and they had so much fun trying to find him. Sometimes he would even move when we were not home. They would write him notes and he would write back to them always reminding them to be nice. It was a lot of fun, but I don't know if he is going to be able to find our new house in PA. Ariel just caught on about Freya, our resident Book Fairy, and she was a little upset and accused me of lying, so we'll see, if Jack comes back or not, I can't decide.