Here we are! Our North Pole Breakfast 2020. I can’t take any credit for this idea; I saw it featured on another mommy blogger’s website a few years ago and definitely drew my inspiration from that. This is only my second year doing a North Pole Breakfast but I love that it’s a festive and relatively simple way to kickstart the Christmas season. I traditionally like to do mine on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend and our menu is pretty basic: donuts, cookies, waffles, bacon, eggs, and fruit. I think if you wanted to make it more elaborate you could or you could even make it as simple as toast and eggs for breakfast. I don’t think it really matters, your kids will love it all the same.

What makes this a North Pole Breakfast is it marks the return of our Elf on the Shelf, Finley! Is Finley a boy’s name or a girl’s name? I’ve only ever met boy Finleys if I think about it but it sounds like a feminine name to me … and our elf is a girl so she’s a girl elf named Finley. Anyway, Finley returns and always brings advent calendars for the kids. There are tons of different options out there for what type of advent calendar you might want to use but I usually get the Lego ones for my kids (baby A got a Fisher Price one as she’s not old enough for the Legos yet IMO).

I also never tell my kids beforehand when the North Pole Breakfast is (although, I suspect at some point they will figure out the routine and come to expect it on that Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend). On this day, E came into the kitchen first because she’s our early riser and I heard her gasp and run into the playroom. I didn’t want her to spoil the surprise for her siblings yet because I wanted to be able to capture their faces when they saw it so I started yelling – “NOT YET, E! NOT YET! NOT YET NOT YET! SHH! NOT YET!” and SPRINTED into the kitchen at the same time hahaha. I managed to catch the little ones running in 🙂

I wish I’d taken more detailed pictures of the table but I was running off very little sleep and the thought never occurred to me LOL. Basically, the “runner” I have going down the middle of the table is just a giant roll of Christmas wrapping paper and the pom pom trees/Christmas mugs are from Hobby Lobby last year. I plan on reusing these same pom trees and cups every year – I know some moms that switch up the theme and decor every year but I’m not at that level yet haha.

The plates and napkins are all disposable ones from Rifle Paper Co and I bought enough so that we could have the same set for our Christmas Eve dinner, too. I love that since everything is disposable, when we’re done with breakfast I can just toss all the plates onto the “runner”, bunch it all up into the trash, and call it a day.

Everyone got to open their gifts while J & I got the bacon and eggs going. Funny back story – all the kids not only got advent calendars this year but they also got a little stack of Christmas books/activity books too. You can see A opening her books in the picture below. Well … even though everyone’s gifts were labeled with their names, somehow in the excitement D not only opened his advent calendar and his book stack, he unwrapped E’s book stack too but didn’t say anything. Then E was panicking, like “Why don’t I have books? Where are my books?” And see, the thing is I KNEW I had wrapped books for every kid. But I also knew I was super sleep deprived and didn’t trust myself so I started looking in the living room, in our bedroom, under the coffee table, in the closet – all these RANDOM spots that I might have accidentally put it in an exhausted stupor. It doesn’t make sense that I would not have put it with the other gifts at the table but YOU JUST NEVER KNOW WITH ME THESE DAYS. E is getting more and more worked, she’s starting to cry … I was afraid she’d fall into an “autism tantrum” (it’s how I like to describe when she gets so overwhelmed she physically can’t control her emotions anymore and it’s just a giant, sobbing, mess). Finally, I took a moment to look around at all the opened gifts and saw that the books I had specifically wrapped for her were already open … next to D’s advent calendar. In the end, it all ended well but boy was I glad that I wasn’t just losing my mind and putting gifts in random spots they didn’t belong.

Chowing down on our breakfast feast … do you see our elf, Finley, in the jar? She’s in quarantine for the next 10 days because she’s been traveling from the North Pole 😉

Happy little faces all around.

After breakfast, the kids ran around in their Christmas jammies and looked at the new books they got. It was a slow, quiet Saturday morning and exactly what we needed.