When I was young, every year on Christmas Eve, we were allowed to open one present. My grandmother would make all her grandchildren homemade pajamas. We would open them and get to wear them to bed that night. My grandmother lived near a sleeping bag factory so she would buy the flannel that was used for the inside of the sleeping bags that were over stocked or flawed and make the pajamas out of that fabric. We always had matching nightgowns and pajama's. With 8 kids in our family and many other grandchildren, she was sewing for months. My mother saved several of the pajama's and gave one of the nightgowns to one of my girls when they were little. I am not sure where it ended up but it was fun seeing my girls in a nightgown that I wore.
So, when I had kids, I would buy matching pajama's for a few Christmas's and then decided to
start sewing matching pajama's. I don't have all our pictures scrapbooked so I would have to dig through many boxes to pull out all the Christmas pajama pictures but here are a few since we started using digital cameras. Once while visiting the town where my grandma used to live, we visited a second hand store and guess what I found? Lots of flannel fabric from the sleeping bag company! I bought a bin full for $.75 a piece. Each piece made a few pair of pj's! So, you can see in the pictures, that the pj's look like the inside of a sleeping bag which just makes them even more like grandma used to make! I used to make full pj sets or nightgowns but when the girls got older, they just wanted pj bottoms. I gave them the option so we have some years with both options. Also, one year they wanted dance warm-ups so they all got different warm ups for the different teams they were on.
They usually wear the bottoms for the ye
ar and beg me to make them for the next year. Last year, I bought bottoms to go along with their collections, one collects snoopy, one sesame street etc. This year with all the crazy stuff going on with my eldest coming home sick and everything else, I decided to buy them. I found a great find at an after Halloween sale at Walmart. They had "glow in the dark" pajama bottoms. I thought they were so cool that I mentioned it out loud and a lady reached over me and grabbed one of the last pair before I could get them off the rack. So, I bought all five pair that were left leaving one of my petite tall darlings with an extra large pair. That pair ended up being such a joke that we laughed about it all night.
The best part was the shirts I fou
nd to match. How much laughing can you do in a Walmart? I saw the shirts with "Who needs Halloween? My sister scares me enough!" I bought them all. It saved me sewing and each set was less than $5. So worth it not to have to sew and we had so much fun with them and then one girl put her hair in pig tails so she would look like the shirt and the photo shoot went on. I bought some Halloween orange Oreo cookies and got a photo of them all eating one. It was a fun Christmas with lots of laughs about the glow-in-the-dark pj's and the funny shirts. The girls actually really liked the pj bottoms and think they are comfortable. I didn't know if they would like them but they thought the glow thing made them really fun. Even the college student was excited to show them off. 
Matching pj's has really been a fun tradition started before I was born. I love to carry on all those traditions that I enjoyed growing up. What are some of your traditions?
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