If you’re looking for a new Christmas family tradition to start with your kids, may I present The 12 Days of Christmas Books!

I’ve seen several ideas for 25 days of Christmas books but I didn’t have enough time to gather that many Christmas themed books, so I decided to do 12 instead!

Here’s how you can start this tradition in your home.

It’s super fun and my kids always look forward to opening one book each day leading up to Christmas Day!

12 Days of Christmas books family tradition with the list of books we use for toddler, preschool and elementary age kids!

The 12 Days of Christmas Books Family Tradition

Choose 12 books that have an Advent or Christmas theme and wrap them in festive paper. Choose books that fit your kids’ age level, you could do this separately for older and younger kids if you’d like!

We gathered books from our stash (we keep the Christmas books packed away so they sometimes don’t remember which ones we have) and also borrowed some from the library.

**You can easily order a few even now off of Amazon Prime and have them in time for your last few days of books!

This year, I’m just trying one set of books with my kids ages 10, 8, 5 and 3. A great way to get your older kids involved in this tradition is to have them read some of the books to their younger siblings!

Label your packages with “Day 1, Day 2, etc” leading up to Christmas Eve (or you can include Christmas Day as well)! Then each day, you just unwrap a book and read it aloud.

christmas books

Here is a video I made showing you the books we are using this year. There are a few more that we’re not using that I suggested in the list below the video!

The Twelve Days of Christmas, Jan Brett

1001 Things to Spot at Christmas

Little Blue Truck’s Christmas

God Gave Us Christmas

The Legend of the Poinsettia

Itsy Bitsy Christmas

The Tale of Three Trees

Snowmen at Christmas

The Christmas Story: Brick Bible (Legos)

Madeline’s Christmas

Room for a Little One

Tonight You Are My Baby

The Legend of the Candy Cane

Little Bible Playbook: The First Christmas

The Christmas Promise

If it’s easier to see the books all at once, you can find them (as well as many other ideas!) on my Amazon store page!

I hope you enjoy starting this tradition with your family! Moms, dads, grandparents and daycare providers can all do this! I think it’s a really fun way to get our kids excited about Christmas plus promote a love of reading and remind them of the true meaning of this season too. Merry Christmas!

You may also like: 20+ Non-Toy Gift Ideas for Christmas

12 books of Christmas - a fun family tradition to get you reading aloud with your kids and enjoying the Christmas season!

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8 Comments on 12 Days of Christmas Books – How to Start This Christmas Family Tradition!

  1. I love this idea! I want to do this. Are all the books just under the tree? How do you give them to a 3 year old?
    Thank you

    • Hi Cindy! What I did was wrap all the books and put them in a Christmasy basket and then they just pulled out one each day. If you have a special one you want to save for Christmas Eve, you could number the books and put them in a basket or under the tree and they can find the “right” number each day! You could also make it a hide and seek game, where you hide each day’s book around the house and they can look for it. Hope that helps!

  2. I did this last year, 25 books and movies. I wrapped them in January, and by December, I was as excited about opening them as my son! I need to do that again when I pack them away after Christmas this year !

  3. I did this with my 2 year old this past Christmas. It was way more successful that I could have imagined! He was so excited for bedtime each night. I would definitely recommend it.

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