Santa Lucia Day: How We Celebrate

Here's how we celebrate Santa Lucia Day!

One of our favorite family traditions every holiday season is to celebrate Christmas traditions from around the world with our kids. 

Each year we add another holiday to the calendar and prepare to go all out with our celebration. The kids look forward to it every year.

This year we added Santa Lucia Day to our calendar.  Boy oh boy was Princess excited.  

She has wanted to celebrate this holiday every year since she learned about it.

There was a reason I had waited though.

Santa Lucia Day definitely takes a bit of planning and preparation. 

When you have kids with diverse needs and special dietary needs, it becomes even more of a challenge.

But we did it and it was a HUGE success! 

 How We Celebrate Santa Lucia Day

Clothing

The first challenge of celebrating Santa Lucia Day was to find the dress/attire for each of the kids.

The oldest daughter usually plays the part of Santa Lucia, but in some families girls in the family take turns. 

Santa Lucia wears a a white dress with a red ribbon and wreath of candles on her head.  

Boys can dress up as Star Boys and walk in procession behind Santa Lucia with candles. All boys, young and old can wear Star Boy hats. 

Younger boys usually where a white gown or robe. Older boys and men may wear white pants and shirt.

In our family Dinomite opted for the pants and shirt, while Bulldozer chose to wear a robe. Surprisingly, both boys were excited to wear the Star Boy hats.  I can't say that I expected that.  Lol.

So I'm guessing you're wondering where in the world we found all of this stuff. I'm not going to lie, it was a bit of a challenge.  Here are our favorite finds!

Where to Find Clothing for Santa Lucia Day

The Crown

Our Santa Lucia Crown with candles was purchased from a Scandanavian shop in Kansas of all places. 

It's made of plastic, which means you really need to be gentle with it. But it definitely did the job. I love that it's adjustable so as my girls grow, the crown can still work.

If your oldest daughter is still too small for a real crown, the Scandinavian shop also has the most adorable crowns for babies and toddlers!

The Wreath

The candles are supposed to be in a wreath, not just a crown. 

To remedy this we ordered a beautiful hairband from Amazon that we wrapped around the gold crown for the desired effect. 

I love that the hairband was adjustable as Princess has a really small head for her age.

The Dress

We used a white nightgown from Amazon for Princess to wear as Santa Lucia. We then picked up red ribbon from the store.

Star Boy Hat

To find hats that would fit my boys, I went to Etsy. Mindful Stitching has beautiful felt Star Boy hats that can be used for kids and adults. Both my husband and Dinomite could wear the hats with no folds. With folds, the possibilities are endless for younger kids.

White Robe

Bulldozer's white robe is a white choir robe I found on Amazon. It worked perfectly for him! 

White Pants

Dinomite's pants were also from Amazon.  He found them to be very comfortable.

Candle Holder

Dinomite is quite sensitive to fire, so we wanted to find a candle holder that he could feel comfortable with. The candle holders that we chose from Amazon, have handles on them so Dinomite was okay with them.

Candles

Once again, to help Dinomite, I was able to find some wonderful dripless, smokeless candles from Amazon to use in the candle holders. Not worrying about the smoke or wax dripping, did wonders for Dinomite.

Food

Once we had our outfits all sorted out, it was time to figure out how we were going to pull off the food aspect of the holiday with all of our special dietary needs.

Typically saffron bread or Santa Lucia buns are served with coffee for the occasion. 

We don't drink coffee.

My kids won't eat anything with saffron in it.

And some of us are gluten and dairy free.

So, instead we went with the most delicious cinnamon rolls that fit all our special dietary needs from Gluten-Free Palate, served with allergy friendly hot-cocoa, which everyone enjoyed.

If you would like other more traditional ideas for Santa Lucia Day, be sure to check out our Santa Lucia Day Activities, Free Printables and More! post on the blog.

Our hot cocoa was served from our PB teapot on our PB serving tray. (Our tray is holiday themed, but that is no longer available.)

Our Santa Lucia Day procession and breakfast were a big success.  

We continued our day learning more about the Santa Lucia Day.

Santa Lucia's Day Printable Pack

Learning about Santa Lucia's Day is so easy and fun when using this beautiful printable pack designed for children in Montessori preschool and elementary classrooms.

The true-to-life images make this printable pack absolutely stunning.

After a morning of fun and an afternoon of learning, we ended the evening with a delicious Swedish meal!

My kids had never had Swedish meatballs before. My husband and I were thrilled when EVERYONE loved them. The mashed potatoes and green beans on the side made for such a delicious dinner.

We used the Swedish Christmas meatballs recipe from Sourdough and Olives and then prepared the gravy recipe from Savory Nothings to go with them for people who wanted it. (I'm a gravy person, so I needed gravy.  Lol.)

The kids have already requested that we have this meal every year on Santa Lucia Day and can't wait to add more traditional dishes to the feast!

With a bit of planning and preparation, you too can have a fantastic Santa Lucia Day.  It turned out to be such a special holiday for us filled with so many happy memories. We hope it can be the same for you!

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