The Twinkle & Pine Christmas Morning Guide: How to Make Christmas Morning Feel Magical Without Spending All Morning in the Kitchen
My perfect Christmas morning starts while it’s still dark outside.
I don’t want to wake up at four o’clock in the morning because there are things to bake, presents left to wrap, or a dozen little things I forgot to do. I want to lie in bed for a minute and enjoy the cozy, fluffy Christmas bedding for as long as possible. I want to put on my red Christmas robe, percolate the coffee, maybe make a matcha too, and turn on something twinkly and Christmasy in the background.
If it’s snowing outside, even better.
The house smells like pine and cinnamon candles and the cedar wreaths that I hang on the inside of my house every year. The stockings are stuffed. The presents are wrapped and beautiful under the tree. Cinnamon rolls are already handled. There is nowhere I need to rush off to and, most importantly, I am not spending Christmas morning in the kitchen.
It wasn’t always that way.
I used to wake up early and bake on Christmas morning because I thought that was simply part of making Christmas special. And I think a lot of women do the same thing. We move through fall, Halloween and Thanksgiving telling ourselves we’ll handle Christmas in December. We know we can pull it off—we always do.
Then Christmas morning arrives and somehow we’re still producing Christmas instead of actually enjoying it.
But I’ve learned that a magical Christmas morning doesn’t require lowering your standards or giving up the things that make Christmas feel special. A few small decisions made earlier in the season can completely change what December 25th feels like.
So if your ideal Christmas morning involves more coffee by the tree and a whole lot less time standing over the stove, here’s where I would start.
1. Decide What You Want Christmas Morning to Feel Like
Before you decide what you’re serving for breakfast or what time everyone is coming over, decide how you actually want Christmas morning to feel.
For me, I want it to feel relaxed, leisurely and slow.
I want it to be perfectly fine if I’m still standing in the kitchen in my Christmas pajamas at 11 o’clock drinking coffee. I don’t want to be looking at the clock thinking, I still need to shower. I need to set the table. Did anyone season the prime rib? Who’s peeling the potatoes? And wait—are there still presents that need to be wrapped?
We tend to accept that kind of chaos as part of Christmas because, for a lot of us, that’s simply how Christmas has always been done.
I grew up watching the adults stay up half the night cooking, baking and wrapping, only to wake up the next morning and start doing it all over again. So of course we learned that Christmas is busy. Christmas is exhausting. Christmas morning is wonderful—but there is also a lot to get done.
It doesn’t have to be.
Sometimes moving just two or three things out of Christmas morning can give you hours of the day back. Christmas can still be every bit as beautiful. The prime rib can still be on the table. The presents can still be piled underneath the tree.
You just don’t have to be working on all of it while everyone else is enjoying Christmas morning.
2. Easy Christmas Morning Breakfast Ideas That Keep You Out of the Kitchen
My number-one rule for Christmas morning breakfast is very simple: I don’t cook it on Christmas morning.
That doesn’t mean breakfast isn’t special. We have cinnamon rolls and coffee, and for fun, Grandma’s sugar cookies—because it’s Christmas and you can absolutely eat a sugar cookie for breakfast.
I’ll pick up croissants from the bakery and put together a tray with pre-sliced ham and cheese. I’ll usually have another grazing tray with cheese, salami, crackers and olives. Most of it can be assembled the night before, and honestly, some of it can be done on December 23.
I do something similar on Christmas Eve, which makes it even easier. Make the beautiful tray once, keep it in the refrigerator and pull it back out when everyone gets hungry.
Around brunch, I like having mimosas. Later in the afternoon, I might put out a good chip dip or replenish and cheese tray. We graze throughout the day and don’t really sit down for a proper meal until Christmas dinner, usually sometime between four and six depending on who’s coming.
I’ve also stopped believing that everything has to be homemade to count as special or meaningful.
I used to make rolls from scratch. Now? Rhodes makes a better roll, and I’m perfectly happy to let them.
I’m even changing my cinnamon rolls this year. Instead of making them completely from scratch, I’m experimenting with The Food Nanny’s one-hour bread mix after seeing her daughter use it for cinnamon rolls. If I can keep the homemade cinnamon-roll experience and eliminate some of the work, I’m doing it.
Because special and homemade are not the same thing.
A bakery croissant on a beautiful tray can feel special. Pre-sliced ham and cheese can feel special. Pour the cocoa into the Christmas mugs. Serve the mimosa in a beautiful coupe or flute glass. Pull out the festive plaid napkins—I love the ones from Pottery Barn. Light the candles. Turn on the Christmas music.
Sometimes the thing that makes breakfast feel like Christmas isn’t what you cooked.
It’s how you served it.
And if breakfast can be made the night before, bought from a bakery, pulled from the refrigerator or reheated without requiring me to stand in the kitchen while everyone else is having Christmas morning?
Even better.
3. Christmas Morning Traditions Are the Things They’ll Remember
I don’t think you need to invent a new Christmas tradition every year.
Actually, I think we’ve started confusing traditions with activities, and they’re not necessarily the same thing.
A tradition is usually something you bring with you. It’s something you’ve done so many times that eventually Christmas wouldn’t quite feel like Christmas without it.
At our house, the tree is lit and the presents underneath it are wrapped in beautiful paper and bows I love. We open stockings before presents. Christmas music is always playing, or sometimes we’ll put something funny like Four Christmases on in the background. We’re in cozy plaid Christmas pajamas. There’s old-fashioned ribbon candy in a glass bowl and this makes Christmas feel complete and nostalgic.
None of that is elaborate.
Some of my favorite Christmas traditions came straight from my childhood. Like the ribbon candy. I still have Christmas ornaments from when I was little—some sparkling glass, some wooden—and they still go on my tree every year.
The food came with me, too.
Cinnamon rolls. Grandma’s sugar cookies. Prime rib. Potatoes. Even the little things, like homemade caramel spooned over warm cinnamon rolls. It takes me about five minutes to make and I can do it weeks ahead, but it tastes like Christmas to me. You can even eat it straight from the jar LOL
I’ve taken so much of what I grew up with and simplified how I make it happen without getting rid of anything that I truly love about Christmas.
I believe that’s the distinction we’ve been missing.
You don’t necessarily need another Pinterest-worthy Christmas tradition. You don’t need to wake up every December wondering what new magical thing you’re supposed to create for your family this year.
If you try something new and everybody falls in love with it? Wonderful. Do it again next year. And the year after that. Eventually it may become one of those things where everyone says, It wouldn’t be Christmas without this.
That’s how a tradition is born.
But some of the things people remember most are incredibly simple.
These days, one of my favorite parts of Christmas is having people over and standing around the kitchen counter talking while everyone grazes. We’ll sit down at the table for Christmas dinner, but eventually everybody gets back up.
Someone wanders toward the dessert table for cookies or a cinnamon roll. Someone makes hot cocoa. Then we’re back to the coffee. Hours later, somebody is eating the dill pickle chip dip again.
There’s no activity scheduled.
We’re just together.
And years from now, I don’t think anyone is going to remember whether I came up with a clever new Christmas activity that year.
They’re going to remember what Christmas at our house always felt like.
4. Don’t Rush Into the Rest of Christmas Day
There is this moment on Christmas morning when the last present gets opened and suddenly everyone gets up.
Wrapping paper gets gathered. Bows get thrown away. Breakfast dishes get carried to the kitchen. And if you’re the one who makes Christmas happen, your brain immediately moves on to the next thing.
I need to clean the kitchen. I need to start the potatoes. I need to get the prime rib going. I still need to shower. I need to set the table. People are coming.
And just like that, Christmas morning is over.
Christmas morning isn’t supposed to be the intermission between opening presents and making Christmas dinner.
You spent all of October, November and December creating this.
Stay here for a minute.
At my house, the hours after gifting are wonderfully uneventful. I might be on the couch eating chips and dip. I’ll take a bath, do my hair and makeup eventually, and put on something a little nicer before my people arrive.
Sometimes I take a nap. I call it a champagne nap. You should try it!
I love going for a walk, bundling up and going outside to feed the cows in the cold, or wandering out to say hello to the cats.
It’s a very snacky, loungey kind of day with any stress, really.
And I’m able to let it be that way because Christmas dinner doesn’t require me to disappear into the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon.
The potatoes don’t need to be peeled. The rolls don’t need to be made from scratch. Everything doesn’t need to be homemade simply because it’s Christmas.
There are still dishes. There is still wrapping paper everywhere. Eventually I’ll get dressed. Eventually dinner will go in the oven.
It just doesn’t all need to happen the second the last Christmas present is opened.
This is actually the entire reason I created SLEIGH.
I don’t want less Christmas. I want all of it. The beautiful dinner, the gifts, the cinnamon rolls, the pretty wrapping paper, the candles, the traditions—I want all of it.
I just don’t want to spend Christmas morning producing the next part of it.
5. The Secret to a Slow Christmas Morning Starts Before Christmas Morning
The secret to a slow Christmas morning isn’t hidden somewhere in your 500 saved Pinterest pins.
It’s having a plan before Christmas morning gets here.
When I look at the things that used to take up the most time on Christmas Day, so many of them never actually needed to happen on December 25th.
Gifting is the obvious one. I want it handled in October and, if at all possible, completely finished before Thanksgiving. The presents can be bought. The wrapping can be done. There is no reason for me to still be dealing with either one on Christmas morning.
Then there’s the food.
I make my potato casserole in November and freeze it. That one decision alone can give me about 90 minutes back on Christmas Day.
The roast can be seasoned the night before and waiting in the refrigerator. A couple of hours before dinner, someone puts it in the oven—and by the way, that someone doesn’t necessarily have to be you.
Delegating counts.
I’ve also stopped making things from scratch simply because I think I’m supposed to. I’ve spent plenty of Christmases making homemade artichoke dip. I have a five-minute version that I love, but you know what else works? Buying the delicious artichoke dip from Costco, placing it in a beautiful bowl and serving it with chips.
Nobody cares that you didn’t make the dip.
The biggest difference for me has come from a few simple changes: I freeze what freezes well. I get gifting out of the way early. And I know what we’re eating and how the day is going to work before the day arrives.
I’m not standing in my kitchen on Christmas morning wondering what we’re having for dinner. The prime rib was bought weeks ago. The potato casserole was made and frozen weeks ago. The cookies can be waiting in the freezer.
I’m not doing less at Christmastime.
I’m doing the same Christmas in a much more efficient way.
And that’s the real secret to getting Christmas morning back.
Christmas Morning Was Never Supposed to Be About the Hustle
Christmas morning was never supposed to be about how much work you could get done.
We’ve just made it that way.
And I think we can undo that pretty easily once we remember what actually matters.
Ten years from now, nobody is going to care that you stayed up until midnight wrapping the last presents. They’re not going to remember whether the cinnamon rolls were completely homemade or whether you peeled every potato yourself.
They’re going to remember sitting around laughing and telling stories.
They’ll remember the puzzle that took over the table. The card games. The funny Christmas movie playing in the background. The year the snowstorm came through and nobody could go anywhere.
They’ll remember the time together—even the quiet parts.
I’ve done Christmas both ways. I used to make everything from scratch because that’s simply how I’d always done it. Now I’m somewhere happily in the middle.
If I feel like making my artichoke dip from scratch, I will. If I don’t, Costco makes a delicious one.
I’ve always made cinnamon rolls from scratch. This year I’m trying a shortcut that could turn hours of baking into about an hour. And if they’re delicious?
Why wouldn’t I?
I don’t need to prove how much I love Christmas by making it harder on myself.
The standard isn’t how much of Christmas I made from scratch. The standard is whether we got to enjoy it.
So keep the beautiful Christmas.
Keep the prime rib and the cinnamon rolls. Keep the ridiculously pretty presents, the candles, the Christmas pajamas and the traditions your family would miss if they disappeared.
Just stop assuming that you have to spend Christmas morning working to have it all.
You made Christmas. Now stay here long enough to enjoy it.
Want to Get the Work Out of December?
This is exactly why I created SLEIGH | The Holiday Edit.
SLEIGH takes the Christmas you’re already creating and helps you handle the behind-the-scenes work before December gets here—so you’re not peeling potatoes, wrapping presents or standing over the stove while everyone else is having Christmas morning.
Inside, I’ve mapped out what to handle in October, what to handle in November, and what can actually wait until December.
You’ll also get my Christmas Shortcut, with the practical lists I use to keep all those tiny Christmas details from living in my head—gifting, wrapping supplies, pantry and freezer prep, batteries, tape and all the little things that somehow turn into another December errand.
And I’ve included the shortcuts I actually use at my own house, including make-ahead food, my five-minute artichoke dip, Grandma’s sugar cookies, Christmas menus and the little decisions that give me hours (if not, days) of Christmas back.
This isn’t about doing less Christmas.
It’s about handling Christmas differently so you actually get to be there for it.
Christmas Handled. December Yours.
[GET SLEIGH | THE HOLIDAY EDIT →]
