12 Nights of Christmas Movies | Fun, Family Christmas Tradition

We started 12 Nights of Christmas Movies last Christmas because G is getting older and a lot of our previous traditions are just too juvenile now. (Don’t worry, we’ve kept a few! But kids grow up and teenagers don’t want to make crafts, see Santa, make reindeer food, etc)

12 Nights of Christmas Movies is simple.

Wrap up 12 Christmas movies and put them in a random stack. Each night, grab a movie unwrap it and watch it. You can start exactly 12 nights before Christmas or you can start shortly after the first of the month, especially when you know there are nights you won’t be able to watch a movie.

I love this one because last year it was an extremely frugal activity at a time when that’s exactly what I needed. We owned a few Christmas movies on DVD and the rest we watched on our available streaming platforms. For movies we watched on streaming, I printed out the movie cover and taped it to another DVD case just so we could still have the unwrapping fun. The only thing I purchased for last Christmas was ELF because we did not have a copy of that and I knew we wanted to add that to our collection. So that was a surprise gift! (ELF on DVD is usually under ten bucks on Amazon)

This year, I’m getting a few more movies on DVD because we are ditching streaming services after the new year. I was slightly disappointed in Amazon’s prices on most of the older Christmas movie DVDs I wanted. So I have bought USED DVDs from THRIFTBOOKS. I use Thriftbooks a TON for books, but I didn’t realize until recently that they actually have DVDs too! I got several for $5 or less AND earned enough points to get a FREE one as well! DVDs from Thriftbooks has been great for my Christmas budget!

I’ve also picked up several non-Christmas movies on DVD since we are going to get rid of streaming, I wanted to make sure we had some of our favorites on DVD. I’m going to wrap all those up in a box and give to G for Christmas also!