FALL-ing in Love With This Season: Favorite Fall Traditions

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times... I LOVE traditions!

I'm obsessed. It's a sickness, really.

I'm also obsessed with the fall. It is most-definitely, without a doubt my favorite season. So what happens when these two obsessions collide, you may ask?

Magic, my friends.

Pure, autumnal magic.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of our favorite fall traditions:

Decorating for Fall

This is actually on the agenda for today. We usually decorate in the last week of September. We put all our fall/harvesty stuff out along with a few Halloween things I have. Then after Halloween, I put away the Halloween stuff and bring out a few Thanksgiving things I have. But all my non-specific fall decor stays up from late September though December 1st!

Here are a few pics of last year's decorations.

Apple Picking

This will be our 3rd year taking the kids apple picking, and Bennett LOVES it! Before we go, I really like watching this Johnny Appleseed video. I love this fall-ish, educational tradition!

Making Fall Goodies!

A few of our favorites are pumpkin bread, homemade applesauce, caramel apples, pumpkin cookies, molasses cookies, hot apple cider, apple pie... and many more! There are lots of apple recipes here because we have a LOT of apples to use up after apple picking! The spicy, warm, delicious tastes of this season cannot be beat!

Some new recipes I'm looking forward to trying are:


*Monster Munch

*Candy Corn Cupcakes

* Chocolate Owls
*Pecan Pie Muffins

*Tuscan Style Potato Soup

*Streusel-Topped Pumpkin Bread

*Maple-Walnut Chicken
*Iced Oatmeal Applesauce Cookies

Charlie Brown Movies!

A fun family tradition is definitely watching Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin in October and A Charlie brown Thanksgiving and The Charlie Brown Mayflower Voyage in November. These remind me of growing up, and I love the nostalgic feeling I get watching them with my own kids. Also, the Mayflower video is very educational!!! I think these will be our Family Movie Night picks for October and November.

Pumpkin Patch

Visiting the Pumpkin Patch has become one of our favorite October activities. I especially love photographing the kids among the pumpkins. Look how tiny Mallie Gal was last year... sniff.

We also love the "How Tall This Fall" photo ops... such a great way of documenting the kids through the years. I'm thinking it would be really fun to put all these pictures together in a coffee-table book one day. Here's Bennett last year...

Pumpkin-Carving

Of course no Halloween/Harvest season would be complete without pumpkin carving! We do ours on Halloween morning accompanied by some Pumpkin Pancakes! I loved seeing Bennett's face as he stuck his hands into the slimy goo inside the pumpkin. We like to read The Pumpkin Patch Parable before we carve our pumpkins. It brings a spiritual focus to this fun tradition.

Thankfulness Tree

This was a new tradition last November, and it really was an awesome way to cultivate grateful hearts during the Thanksgiving season. I drew a plain fall tree on butcher paper, and then every day we each wrote down things we were thankful for on leaf cutouts. Then we taped them to the paper. By the end of the month, our "tree" was full of thankfulness!