4 CHRISTMAS Traditions Americans LOVE

HO HO HO all! I'm coming to you from Colorado in the United States.

And I'm just so excited to share this vlog style lesson with you.

If you've ever wanted to live in the United States.

Well, I'm going to be bringing you here virtually today so you can experience

firsthand what some of our Christmas traditions are like.

Like making Christmas cookies or decorating a Christmas tree

like this one, or maybe taking a stroll through a wintery meadow,

or maybe going out on the town to see all lit up.

In my opinion, in Colorado, we really know how to do Christmas

right with the snow and the lights.

There's really nothing like it, and I'm just so excited to share it with you.

And you're also going to learn some really useful vocabulary. So let's go.

So I'm making a typical Christmas treat, often referred to as Christmas cookies,

but they simply are sugar cookies cut out and decorated.

So this is a roller.

And what you see me doing here:

I'm rolling the dough.

At moments you can also see me kneading the dough, which is when I use my hands to mix

and make the dough flat and soft as I have just taken it out of the refrigerator.

Now this sugar cookie dough is a bit crumblier

than other types of dough, such as that of pizza, for example.

That's why it breaks apart like this.

Let's put it back together. That's better.

If you've ever rolled out dough, you know it can get a bit sticky.

The dough gets stuck to the roller, your hands the table.

That's when I realized

I should flour my roller and the surface, so that doesn't happen.

This dough can be quite tough, so I need to apply some pressure here.

All right. So this is coming along nicely.

Oh, my tummy is starting to growl.

I can't wait to take a bite out of these scrumptious cookies.

Now here I'm using these cookie cutters to make shapes.

These cookie cutters are special for Christmas.

Here are all the shapes. This is a star.

This is a Christmas tree, a snowflake, a snowman.

And this one is the gingerbread man.

Graham: "Okay". Ethan: By the way, meet Graham, my six year old nephew,

and he's my helper in this video.

Oops! Graham sure is excited to get his hands on the cookie dough.

No, no, no, no. What are you doing?

What are you going to do?

Get the dada. Go jump on him.

It is pretty typical that kids make cookies like these in December. Want to know why?

So we leave cookies and milk

for Santa Claus as a way to thank him for the presents he's bringing us.

When I was a kid, it was always super exciting to run downstairs

on Christmas morning and find nothing but an empty glass and cookie crumbs.

Santa must have liked my cookies.

So we are going to make cookies!

This is a snowman.

The dough is on the roller.

What are you doing?

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Just driving in the car, and I wanted to show you

just like what it's like, there's Christmas lights everywhere. So check that out!

All over the place, and snow.

If you're ready for la creme de la creme,

we have some neighbors that have an absolute spectacular light show.

So this is something really typical in the United States will be in the winter

to drive around and see people's decorations at their houses.

But these guys really take the cake.

So let me show you.

I don't know how much time they spend, you know, doing these decorations.

But yeah, we have people all the time

driving up through our neighborhood just to be able to sneak

a peek at this tremendous light show that these guys got going.

So check it out.

I don't know if you can see that it's finally snowing.

It's really coming down nice and white out there.

See how beautiful it is?

Some snow today, finally, so it's nice and white.

Ideal Colorado winter out here, walking in the woods,

just something we like to do all the time here in Colorado with the doggies.

I've been sharing with you some of our Christmas traditions in the USA.

But I'm really curious, what do you do this time of year in your country?

Do you celebrate Christmas or maybe another holiday?

What traditions do you have?

Let's share them down in the comments below and discover some other cultures.

The cookies take about ten minutes to bake,

and then we have to

leave them to cool before Graham and I can get to the most fun part

decorating them.

Are you ready, Graham? Action!

Ethan: Say, "Gigi get out of the shot." Graham: Gigi get out of the shot!

Ethan: Graham, what are we doing? Graham: We're putting...

Should we put the cookies here?

What are we doing?

We're making cookies.

What kind of cookies are you decorating right now?

A Christmas tree.

So what color are you putting on it?

Graham: Green. Ethan: You are putting green on it?

Bring your sleeves up so you don't get frosting on your sleeves.

All right. So you got a tree.

What else do we have here?

Graham: Blue ornament. Ethan: What's this?

Graham: Gingerbread man. Ethan: Gingerbread man. What's here?

Graham: A snowman. Ethan: Snowman.

Ethan: What's this? Graham: A snowflake.

Why don't you do another one?

That one looks like it's pretty done, it's got a lot of frosting on it.

No, no sticking in your mouth. No sticking in your mouth. Graham.

How about I put some frosting on these ones,

and then you can decorate them with ice and stuff and sprinkles.

Graham: Yeah, I'm going to make a red gingerbread man. Ethan: Nice.

Ethan: Who are we making the cookies for Graham? Graham: All of us?

All of us. Who else? Should we give some to Santa?

So he leaves us some good presents under the tree?

Give him some cookies and milk?

Yeah, I'm gonna make ornaments on the gingerbread man.

This one is white, do you want to put some eyes on it?

Here, grab some eyes.

Put some eyes on the gingerbread man.

You gave him three eyes?

That's pretty silly.

That one's got like six eyes.

How about an eyeball in my mouth?

Ethan: No more in your mouth. Graham: Look, an eye ball goes in my eye.

So I was just decorating the tree with my mom.

We have all these different Christmas ornaments

and something we like to do in my family every year

leading up to Christmas is get the tree.

This is a plastic one.

We used to actually buy real ones, but we found that this is a lot easier,

a lot less of a mess and we break out the Christmas ornaments.

I've actually got one here. That's pretty funny.

This is my baby's first Christmas ornament.

A lot of people will have those.

So that's with a picture from when I was born and we have here a tree, you can see.

So, I'm just hanging this one up on the tree up here, up high.

I'm just going to hang this one up here on the tree.

I think I got it.

And you can see ours

is really packed because a tradition we had in my family was my mom

every year would get an ornament for my brother and I

that maybe had something to do with

some thing that we were really interested in that year or a trip we took or something like that.

So for example, when I was living in Brazil, my mom got me this one that year.

This one's from Chile. From when I lived in Chile.

Let's see what else we got here.

Just like this one down here, for example, if you can see, here's

a little fisherman because my brother used to be really into fishing.

So that's pretty cool.

It's a really nice part of the year that I always look forward to.

And then a good American tree would not be complete without one of these.

This is called a candy cane.

And we hang these on the tree and it's got that like cane shape.

That's why it's called that.

And these are also nice treats during the holidays.

But we have like so many cookies and other kinds of sweets that I don't

usually actually eat this because I prefer things like the cookies.

But it's nice because they're on the tree.

So if you have a sweet tooth, you can grab one.

I hope that you're feeling the Christmas spirit a little bit more.

This period of the year is amazing to talk to people

to make new friends and share gratitude and positive thoughts.

Wouldn't you love to do that

while practicing your English communication skills?

Well, you can with the RealLife App, so why not give it a try and ask someone

in another part of the world what they do to celebrate the holidays?

You can try it now for FREE, all you have to do

is click up here or in the description down below.

Or you can search for RealLife English in the Apple app or Google Play Store.

OK, so I put some icing on the cookies. While they are still moist

I'm going to add some different colored sprinkles and decorations

so they stick nicely.

These sprinkles are even shaped like little Christmas trees.

And here we have some candy googly eyes to make those snowmen

and gingerbread people come to life.

And voilà, here they are, the Christmas cookies are all done

and ready to be eaten.

Even these two funny looking ones that Graham made. Hmm.

Do we have the next Picasso here?

Meet my other nephew, Dawson.

He was taking a nap, but now he's going to let us know

what he thought of Graham and my cookies. They are good?

Dawson: No. Ethan: No, not good?

Dawson: N..o Yeah! Ethan: Success.

Well, I hope that you enjoyed seeing a bit of my holidays

and learned a lot as well.

Merry Christmas.,

Happy holidays and a Happy New Year, y'all!

By the way, if you want to continue learning about Christmas traditions,

then check out this lesson about the top ten Christmas movies to learn English.