Our Favorite (Easy!) Valentine’s Day Tradition

Do you have any Valentine Traditions with your kids? We keep Valentine’s Day pretty simple, but we do have one tradition: Valentine’s Day Breakfast. We’ve kept the tradition for many years! If it’s a school day, we get up early. If it’s the weekend, we sleep in and have more of a brunch.

I set the table the night before: Red tablecloth, heart confetti, the nicest dishes and stemware we have, cloth napkins, that sort of thing. The menu changes depending on the day. It might be French Toast with fresh strawberries and whip cream — or it might be toaster waffles if we don’t have much time on a busy school day. And to drink? We always make raspberry milk.

I have no memory of how or when the raspberry milk started, but for some reason, we only make it on Valentine’s Day.

Before the kids get up in the morning, I like to put a small gift on their plate. And I’m not joking when I say small. When they were little, it was often a box of character-bandaids. Later, it was often a favorite candy bar. These days, it might be some inexpensive jewelry or an enamel pink for their denim jacket — or maybe something from the dollar section at Target.

And there you have it. Breakfast is pretty much the whole sum of our Valentine focused celebrations.

How about you? Do you have any Valentine’s Day traditions at your house? Do you do everything up in a big way? Lots of decorations? Homemade Valentines — like these pom pom heart bookmarks? Or is it pretty low-key at your house? 

P.S. — One year in France Maude woke up early and made our Valentine breakfast.

5 thoughts on “Our Favorite (Easy!) Valentine’s Day Tradition”

  1. I too do a breakfast table display (although not such a fun fancy meal). My sister and niece share a V-day birthday so it’s always a big celebration for them–heart lights and decor all things red and pink. So ever since we were little my mom would bake a heart cake for the Valentine’s birthday–super easy if you do a pink cake mix in a square and a round pan. Then cut the circle in half and align those halves with the square turned as a diamond, and frost as a heart shape.

  2. I love the raspberry milk idea! We don’t do gifts for this type of day, but we do have the tradition of chocolate fondue! We sometimes refer to it as “chocolate soup”, but it’s something we all look forward to. The kids love it!

  3. I’ve been doing the Valentine’s Breakfast tradition too (and a back to school breakfast on the first day). We usually do heart shaped cinnamon rolls, from a can. You just unroll the outside a little and then roll it back in to make a heart. I get a few treats and decorations at Target or Michael’s, try to write a little note to each of them, and the kids love it…toddlers up to teens! I think these will be some special memories that they hold in their hearts.

  4. On Valentine’s morning our kids wake up to a trail of paper hearts that leads from their rooms to a small gift each (usually a box of chocolates). On each heart is the name of someone (or sometimes family) that loves them. It is wide ranging so there are hearts with people from our work, extended family they may not know that well, teachers (past and present), our college friends, etc…. They are really invested in it now and we leave the hearts for awhile so they can look them over. The idea was to help remind them in a visual way how surrounded in love they are even from people they may not know or think about.

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