THE MILK
Welcome to The Milk- the podcast that pours it all out: the messy, the magical, & the mildly unhinged moments of motherhood and womanhood. Real talk, honest stories, and reminders that none of us really know exactly what we’re doing- and that’s kinda the best part! I’m Tayla- your host and mom of soon to be three. So let’s laugh, learn, and milk this season of life for all that it’s worth.
THE MILK
Holiday Traditions! How We’re Redefining Them As A Family I Episode 4
Happy Holidays ladies!! I thought it would be fun to ring in the pre-holiday cheer by talking all things "traditions"- ones our family did when I was young, ones I've done since having kids & new traditions I'm starting this year to hopefully last decades to come.
I talk about starting small and staying flexible—my goal of picking three to five traditions that travel well through busy seasons- because we do NOT need to try to do it all (us moms are superheroes regardless). I've learned it's the simple, repeatable traditions that build real connection without the stress spiral.
I also felt it was necessary to touch on holiday anxiety. As joyous as this time of year can be, it can also be shared with sadness, loneliness, & loss. So if this year doesn't feel as you were hoping- I'm sending you a big hug through this episode.
More On What I Cover:
• reflecting on childhood traditions and identity
• naming anxiety and loneliness during the holidays
• replacing pressure with presence and intention
• yearly ornament ritual and tree decorating night
• mini-tree hack for kids and core memory moments
• matching pajamas, signature breakfast, baking night
• sponsoring a family and blending cultural recipes
• light walks, markets, donations, and gratitude circles
• choosing three to five traditions and staying flexible
If you're still looking for last-minute holiday gift ideas, HERE is a link to my gift guides to help you find something for your friends, family, partner, kids, or yourself!
If this resonated, I'd be so grateful for you subscribing to The Milk, leaving a simple review, or passing the podcast along to a friend.
Subscribe now for weekly episodes that remind you you're not alone, you're not crazy, and you're doing way better than you think.
Follow for more:
IG: @TaylaBurke @TheMilkPodcast_
YouTube: @TheMilkPod
TikTok: @TheMilkPod @Tayla_Burke
Welcome to The Milk, the podcast that pours it all out, the messy, the magical, and the mildly unhinged moments of motherhood and womanhood. Real talk, honest stories, and reminders that none of us really know exactly what we're doing, and that's kind of the best part. I'm Taylor, your host, and soon-to-be mom of three. So let's laugh, learn, and milk this season of life for all that it's worth. Hi guys, welcome back to The Milk, another week, another episode. I don't know if it's the pregnancy hormones or just something in the air, but I am personally feeling the holiday cheer extra early this year. I don't know about everyone else. Are we feeling the same, or is it just me? Because I don't know if it's frowned upon. We put our tree up mid-November. I think it was November 16th, when everything was getting cold. It was like getting rainy, and I was just like, enough is enough. I need some wholesome lights and a tree inside the house that I can wake up to and drink my coffee to and just snuggle around the fire. And that's exactly what we did. And I have zero regrets of doing it so early. Anyway, so I'm recording this a little early, probably than when you are actually listening to this episode. So right now it is November. So this past week, I have really been just reminiscing on the holidays that I had as a kid and just reflecting on everything that we did and things that I loved and things that I wish we did more of. And it just made me realize like how cool is it that when we become parents, we have full control over how we want to shape our family's holiday traditions and just everything that we want to instill as the foundation of our family. So this episode is kind of all about that and just kind of my thoughts on it all and some inspo things that I'm personally doing, just so that we can kind of shape the way for what we want our future with our family to look like. I think it's just it's so exciting to be able to kind of start with almost like a blank slate, take things that we want from our family, but then also start new traditions within our own. So for me, I really want to create simple family traditions that I'll be able to repeat every single year with my kids. And for one day, hopefully for them to look back on and remember and potentially bring into their family of their own as well. I really want them to one day say that every year this is what we did as a family, just kind of building those always moments. I actually can't believe I'm saying that right now because the thought of Aspen and Bash having their own children one day is just too much for my brain to process and accept. I just could burst into tears at the thought of it. So I'm just going to file that in a different folder in my brain, and we'll come back to that at another point in my life. So in my family, um, we are a family of three daughters. I'm the oldest. And one thing that I just always remember from the holidays when we were young kids was this silly picture that we'd take of the three girls every single year around the holidays. We were always somewhere warm. So we're South African. So a lot of the time we spent a month back in South Africa when we were young in December, because it was the only time we could see our extended family. And in South Africa during December, it's confusing because it is the middle of summer there. And so we were always in bikinis, we were on the beach, and so our family tradition was us just in bathing suits with a Santa hat on. And it's just something I look back on so fondly of because it was so fun to take the picture and just remember to bring the hats and pack them in our suitcase. And it was really sweet to just see how much we each had grown from year to year. I think we ditched that tradition when we got older and started like developing and maturing, and things could get weird. But it was really fun and wholesome when we had it when we were so young. Not that this is like a tradition, but one thing when I was reflecting on the holidays when I was a kid and young adult, something that came up was just one thing that I really wanted to kind of let go of that I experienced during the holidays as a kid was anxiety and sadness that for some reason stirred up in me around the holidays. It was when I was more of, I would say like a young adult. And even though I was around all my loved ones and just family and friends, for some reason I just felt so empty and anxious. And I can really only pinpoint it back to the years of my life where I feel like we all kind of go through this where it's like our lost phase of like we don't know who what our identity is, we don't know who we are, we don't know what our path was. And something around about just being around other people where I saw confidence or self-assurance and people that seem to have their stuff together more than I did just really made me feel isolated and sad. And so it was when everyone was together, I would just feel that way. And I think not that I I didn't anticipate for this to get deep or anything, um, but I just remember me getting so sad and just feeling like the black sheep and just crying in my bedroom alone, some holidays, being like, why do I feel this sad when it's the happiest time of the year? And the reason why I bring this up, it's just to point out that the holidays isn't all about joy and excitement and fun. And there's no one way that the holidays is supposed to make you feel. I think it can also stir up a lot of negative or difficult to process emotions, um, especially depending on your phase of life, like where you're at in life, um, different family dynamics. Families are tough. Things happen in families and extended families, and there's so many different types of personalities, and also maybe people that you may have recently lost or you might be far away from and can't spend the holidays together. So I think I just wanted to point out just know that you're not alone and no one is telling you there's one way for the holidays to feel or for how you experience them. So if you're not feeling your greatest this holiday season or you haven't in the past, we are with you. I've been there, and it can definitely feel like a lonely time as much as it is supposed to be joyous and exciting and filled with love. So on that note, I am really trying to prioritize feeling more than just like the stuff of the holidays and just making sure I feel as good, if not as great, as I can, and also my family. And to just really try to be intentional with stopping all the things that spread us so thin and just stress us out during the holidays because I feel like there's just this running joke about how stressful the holidays can be and how we're always in over our heads. And it's like, okay, why do we allow ourselves to get there? If what is the actual meaning of the holidays? And to me, it's about bringing people together that you love and cherish and making those special memories with them. It doesn't need to involve a Pinterest perfect checklist that we feel obligated to do, or like you see people doing all of these things over the holidays in Christmas or whatever you're celebrating and feel the need to do that as well. So my goal this holiday season and just every holiday season is to create and instill repeatable, simple rituals that will kind of just become the soundtrack to my kids' childhood, those built-in connection points when life gets chaotic and just the memory anchors that my kids will remember more than the toys. Now, I feel like the biggest obstacle, especially for us moms out there, that we experience during this time of year is wanting to do it all versus being exhausted and on the verge of having a mental breakdown the entire time. It's like we are always our worst enemy, no matter how hard we try not to. So I really want to give us all permission to try our best, including myself. I need to take this advice to try our best to just focus on a few non-negotiables or like top priorities and get really good at just letting go of the rest. So I spent some time making a list of family holiday traditions that I just want to start instilling in my family or ones that we already have that I want to continue doing. And I kind of came up with this list by asking myself a couple questions. Number one was what were my favorite holiday traditions growing up? And number two was there anything in my family that we didn't do that I'd be excited about starting now? So I don't know if that helps, but that's kind of what prompted me to come up with my own list. Okay, so here's my little holiday traditions list, things that I've already started or things that I'm implementing this year and beyond. So number one is a yearly ornament tradition. So pretty much I want each kid to pick out their own ornament every single year, kind of based off of what they're obsessed with that year or just excited about. Also, if your kids are too young, like I would pick these out for Aspen and Bash, the their first year of life. It usually was an ornament that said my first Christmas with the year, and they can be generic, like you can get them at Michaels or Hobby Lobby, but I also think I got some custom made on Etsy, which were really cute with their name and their birth date or just the year that they experienced that Christmas. So that was really sweet to have on our Christmas tree the first year of their life. And then now that they're old enough, I'm so excited for them to go get ornaments of their own. I'm recording this a little early. This is in November, so by the time this comes out, they will have done this already. But soon, maybe next weekend, we'll take them to a store to pick out their own ornaments. And I have a feeling Aspen's gonna go for something like in the musical or dance world. She's so into singing this year and dancing and like playing her guitar. She does little performances for us. So I feel like she'll pick something like that out. And then for Bash, he's obsessed with cars this year and fire trucks. He can't get enough of fire trucks and like paw patrol. So I'm assuming he's gonna pick something out like that. And then I'm going to write their name and the year on the bottom of it so I always can keep track with whose is whose and what they were excited about at what age. And just the thought of one day giving them like their box of ornaments that they can use their first year with their own Christmas tree, just makes me so emo. But I thought that would just be the sweetest gift. Them the first year that they're out over the house, being able to have that to start off, um, no matter where they're at in life, or maybe when they have their own family one day. Cause I feel like I don't know, Bash, if he's like a single boy living in a bachelor pad, it's probably not the best time. Who knows if he'd even have a have a Christmas tree at that point. So maybe it's like the first year when they have their the beginning of their growing family, like if they get married or engaged or something. I feel like that would be super sweet and sentimental. Okay, number two is just a good wholesome tree decorating night. I feel like a lot of these are very intuitive and probably things that we all kind of do, but I just wanted to add some structure to our holidays and just make like a list of all of this. So definitely a tree decorating night. We actually just did this the other night and it was just such a fun way to kick off the holidays. And so for us, this just involves like kind of putting our phones away, turning on Christmas music. You've got to have Christmas music when you're doing this, and setting up our tree. This year we went our faux route because we will be traveling for half of December. So it doesn't make sense for us to get a get a freshie this year. Um, but last year in the last couple of years, we definitely went and we picked one out as a family, which is always so much fun. So the other night we set up our Christmas tree. And one of my mom hacks, especially for the type A or OCD moms out there, is to buy your child like a mini tree on Amazon. It's like 45 bucks. And it's really helped me let go of them wanting to decorate and like the tug of war of like the ornaments and the breakable ones and the knot. And so I have one tree that I bought a few years ago for Aspen, and now the kids are at the age where we set it up and they get to decorate it however they like. I don't have any input, and I just give them non-shatter ornaments, and they just have the time of their life, and that gives me the time and freedom to set up my tree for aesthetic purposes, and so it's like a win-win situation, and they just like loved having their own tree and like that sense of responsibility. They felt just like such big kids, and it just looks so cute. Just seeing how they designed it was just so special. Also, when we had the music on, Aspen, like I said, is very much into performances. So they took the stage in front of Scotty and I, and they just had a full-on performance of all the Christmas songs that they've been singing at school, and it was just such a core memory where Scotty and I were just smiling so big and just looking at each other and looking back, and it's just like we are in such a special phase of our life, and just their age is just so perfect right now, where they're two little besties. It's almost like I look back and I remember being such a scared little girl where I read that pregnancy test when Aspen was eight months old and having bash, and I was just like, oh my gosh, I'm in for like how am I going to survive this? I don't know why I'm getting emotional. Oh my gosh. Um, and just seeing all the hard work pay off and seeing them two and three years old now, just standing in front of us at Christmas time, owning a little stage, dancing and singing together, just hugging like little besties was just such a core memory. And it's like one that's just ingrained in my memory now that I know I'll I'll never forget. Okay, three, family matching Christmas pajamas. Cheesy, yes, but wholesome, yes. To me, nothing gets me more in the holiday spirit than waking up in holiday pajamas. It's like you just naturally have an extra pep in your step and you just feel so put together. And I feel like there's a way to do a little bit more like classy, sophisticated Christmas pajamas rather than just like gringe everything or I don't know. So even just like I love the checkered look. Um, what are we doing this year? I bought Aston and Bashes back in like October. I don't know what's with me. I think it's probably just because I'm pregnant and neurotic, but they've had matching pajamas for months now when they first launched in like September, October. So I still need to get Scotty and I ones. And we don't all have to match, but um, I like if there's now that there's four of us, it's like at least we have to be like a pair each, right? Okay, number four is a signature holiday breakfast. So this year I'm going to let the kids choose because they're still kind of young. I hope one day that we will pick like a very specific dish that we'll just carry out every single year. It could be like cinnamon rolls, which we never have, or holiday pancakes, maybe French toast made from like cookie cutter Christmas trees. I don't know. But something that our kids just genuinely look forward to every year, knowing that they're gonna get. And ideally, I guess this would be on Christmas morning, but I feel like everyone's always traveling to different places, whether they're visiting one family or the other side of the family or on vacation, that it's not really realistic to have it set as one day. Some maybe can achieve that, but I just don't see that for us. So I feel like there needs to be some flexibility. So as long as you can slide this breakfast in somewhere around Christmas or Christmas Eve, I feel like that's okay in my book. So I think this year we're gonna try for on Christmas morning. I feel like that'll be really fun. Okay, number five is baking and movie night. So I just loved we did this last year with Aspen and Bash. Bash was too young, but he kind of still did it. We decorated cookies, and it was just such a mess, so much chaos, but so much fun. And I feel like the whole intention of this is just to let go of the clean kitchen and just let the kids get so creative and just make a big mess. I want to look back at my life and remember the messy kitchen and laugh at it rather than to brag about like the picture perfect cookies and the clean kitchen during the holidays and all of the decorations. I want to remember the chaos and um the relatable moments that brought us all together. And this also doesn't have to be cookie decorating. I'm thinking now, like later on, maybe we'll do gingerbread houses and make it like a friendly competition. Scotty loves a competition and Aspen does too. It's like Aspen, I don't know where they get this from, but where I actually do, if it's from Scotty somehow. Aspen has this new saying that like if we're driving, she's like, we gotta go first. We have to win. Like, if we're at a red light, she has to make sure that Scotty is the first person to take off. Um, and she's and so Scotty and her, like, they're already in this competitive mindset of like the most important thing is to win. Where I'm like, the most important thing is to play fair and have fun. So they're on a different level. So I feel like they would love the gingerbread competition idea. Okay, so number six is something that we personally did in my family that I feel really passionate about bringing into my family is sponsoring a child or family during the holidays. So to do so, you can work with like a local or reputable organization to pretty much sponsor a family or child for the year. Some of you have probably already done this, but I remember when I was a child, this is something that we do. And it's just something I look back on so fondly as a child, where I vividly remember every time we'd sponsor a new family and my mom taking us to the store and just how excited I would get picking out these gifts that I felt like these other kids would get excited about. And I just remember how responsible and just big kid I felt when I would help wrap the gifts. So it was like ideation through execution, and it just made me feel so good as a child. It's just something I really want my kids to experience for themselves. So during the holidays, I just really always want to incorporate some sort of give back component. One, because obviously to help other people who are in need, and two, just to remind my kids how blessed we are and how good it feels to help someone else in need. Like I really remember gaining so much happiness from making other kids happy at such a young age. And I just think it's so important to instill empathy in our children at a young age as well. So that's like my top six for this year and beyond. There were some others that I just wanted to throw out and call out in case anyone's looking for more or different in spell. One is the obvious family holiday photo and holiday cards. I just feel like it would be so fun to make an album and just flip through every single year and just see how much everyone's grown. This is actually the first year I've pulled off a family holiday card. So it's gonna get here in time, I think December 1st, and we're gonna do it. So I don't know if this will be an every year thing, but and I feel like maybe the world will go digital with these types of things, but I was very proud of myself this year. And then the next is making a recipe from both sides of the family to kind of blend traditions. I feel like this is so cool because my family, like I said, is South African, and every single year my mom would make this signature dessert called an called a Melva pudding. If you know, you know, it's like the most incredible, life changing calorie packed dessert. And every one of my American friends that we introduce it to, they just want it every single year. And then Scotty's mom is Italian and she's a chef, so she makes incredible food too. So I feel like with both sides of the family, we could come up with such incredible dishes to kind of blend into our family taste. Together. Also, one that I want to try to bring to the table is mold wine. Um, because I don't like eggnog. I don't get it. I don't get the hype. I don't know how or who does, how you do. Maybe I just haven't had good eggnog, but I don't know. I just don't understand it. But I do want like a hot bevy, you know? So I think mold wine is so cool, so iconic, and it's so fun to be like putting the fruit in. I think my sister made it a couple years ago. So I don't know. I kind of want to perfect that and I want to have that to bring to the table every year. And then kind of like another give back component is just like a toy and clothing donation day. So like going through your closets and your toy bins with your kids and just putting them in big trash bags and just donating them to places that are asking for them. And then another is an annual light walk or drive. When I when we were living more south in Orange County, we'd go down to Dana Point Harbor and they just had all their lights down by the water. And I remember Aspen's eyes just glowing seeing it all. So I feel like doing something like that, if it's in your area, um, that's another fun activity to do. And then if you live by a holiday market, going to a holiday market as a family. I remember one year I was in Prague when I studied abroad, and they just had like the most insane holiday market there. And I don't really know if I mean I'm sure other places and like actual places in America have something like that, but I don't really know of anything around me. But maybe around you, there's a fun holiday market. And also the last one that I just love is a gratitude circled by the tree. So pretty much just getting around the tree as a family, whether it's just like your core family or extended family, and just sharing some things on your heart that you've been grateful for this past year. It's something that you could say out loud or you can put them in a jar. I just feel like that's a very wholesome activity that just grounds us and brings us back into reality and just to remember the why behind all of the holidays as well. So there's so many different traditions that we can incorporate that we could go crazy over it. So I just want to reiterate that we by no means have to do all of this and beyond. I'm personally going to pick probably three to five doable things to achieve this year and just see how they feel and see how they flow in our family and see what I want to carry on. And also just taking into consideration our kids' ages, like babies versus toddlers versus older kids. Like next year, our holidays are probably going to look very different with another baby in our family. So also just like being okay to be flexible and improvise. There is so much time to start new traditions that, like, sometimes I just get so excited that I just want to start everything this year. And I have to remind myself, like, we still have so much life to live. We don't have to start everything now, like, we have so much time in the future. And so that's something that's top of mind too. Anyways, I feel like there's so many other unique traditions that you guys probably have in your family or had when you were growing up that I'd want to hear about them. And I think it'd be so fun to just share. If you are watching on YouTube or if you are listening on Spotify, there's like a comment section. So if you want to comment any of these that you want to share, I think it'd be so fun for others to read and just gain inspo from as well. And I'm just like personally so interested to hear about how everyone experienced the holidays growing up. And also just a reminder for myself and anyone who needs to hear it that we really don't want or need our kids to just remember that the tree was perfect, but that every year we did our thing and just how amazing that felt to reconnect as a family after a busy year. So, yes, that's kind of all I've got for you for my family holiday traditions. Hopefully there was some inspo in there for you as well, too. If you're still looking for last-minute holiday gift ideas, I'll also link my gift guide that I kind of put together for my kids, for family members, for partners, for myself, for friends, um, just everything that's either on my list or that things that I want to gift, um, or just different ideas out there that I'm loving. So happy holidays to you all. I'm sending you so much love, strength, support, whatever you're in need of right now. And I'm just so grateful that you are here and a part of our mom community. As always, feel free to reach out. I'm always on DMs. You can comment on our episodes, make sure to subscribe, leave a comment if you feel like it. It is much appreciated. And until next week.
