Ways to Celebrate Valentine’s Day as a Family

Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!  This week , I’m excited to share with you the different ways we celebrate Valentine’s Day as a family. Valentine’s Day has admittedly been my least favorite holiday I seldom looked forward to.  I have always viewed the day as a mainly consumerist holiday, laced with expectations of flowers, chocolates, and obtaining busy restaurant reservations.  It’s a lot of pressure!  Not to mention EXPENSIVE as well! 

After working several years in the restaurant industry (and on VERY BUSY Valentine’s Days), I decided I wanted to celebrate this holiday a little differently – and that was at home with my family.  Once we started to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a family, it became an occasion we ALL looked forward to!    

Flowers, chocolates, and coveted dinner reservations can make for an AMAZING Valentine’s Day, but sometimes all you need are quiet nights at home with the people you love most.  Celebrating Valentine’s Day as a family has allowed us to start some new traditions and create wonderful memories in the process. 

In this article, I will share with you some of the ways we like to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a family.  Hopefully, these ideas will inspire some of your own Valentine’s Day traditions with your family!

Make Valentines for Friends and Family

The kids love getting crafty, and making Valentines is no exception!  The dollar store is a great place to stock up on Valentine’s stickers, flowers, ribbons, glitter, paint, and anything else you may want to use on your Valentines!  I spread out all the crafting elements we had on the table and the girls got busy creating Valentines for friends and family.  We did this a few days before Valentine’s Day so we could send some in the mail for those who live far away.   

We even received a call from my grandma after receiving her Valentines from the girls.  She was really touched by the gesture and wanted us to know!  It just goes to show that small acts of kindness can have a really big impact. 

Make Valentine’s Day Themed Treats and Eats

There are TONS of fun recipes out there for Valentine’s Day treats and eats.  Check out Pinterest with the kiddos and see what creations pique their interests!  It can be a lot of fun working in the kitchen together to create a treat to be enjoyed together.  Last year we made our very own pizzas with a heart of pepperonis in the middle. 

For a treat, we had fun whipping up these Strawberry Love Notes.  There were SO EASY to make and looked ADORABLE.  Check out the recipe from Delish HERE!

Valentines Brunch

Seeing as how Valentine’s Day landed on a Sunday this year, I decided it would be fun to have a Valentine’s themed brunch!  And by “Valentine’s themed” I mean pink colored foods and beverages, and hearts shapes!  On our Valentine’s brunch menu, we whipped up some pink pancakes topped with whipped cream and heart shaped strawberries.  Valentine’s Day is a day to be indulgent after all!  I used a small amount of red gel food coloring in the pancake batter to achieve the look.  Super simple!

I love Wilton Gel Food Coloring because a little goes A LONG way! And because you are using such a small amount of the gel, you do not have to worry about the coloring changing the taste of your food as you would with traditional food coloring.

*This post contains affiliate links. By clicking these links and making a purchase, I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you!

We paired our pancakes with some heart shaped egg bake bites.  For my egg bake, I included onion, tomatoes, and spinach.  Gotta serve something healthy to pair with our Valentine’s Day indulgences!  There are a couple ways to achieve the heart shaped egg bites.  The easiest way is to prepare your egg bake in heart shaped muffin pans or molds. 

Since I don’t have anything like that in my kitchen, I made my egg bake in a traditional baking pan.  Once the egg bake was finished, I tossed it in the refrigerator to cool, then cut out heart shapes with a cookie cutter I already had on hand.  If this is the route you are going, it is important to make sure the egg bake is COLD when you cut out your shapes.  Then you can reheat when you are ready to serve!  With a new baby in the house, this worked out perfectly as it allowed me to prepare the egg bake the night before.  Then I could simply reheat everything the next day when we were ready for brunch!

Bubbly Beverages

Our brunch wasn’t complete without some pink Valentine’s mimosas!  I mixed these up with some passion fruit juice and pomegranate juice to give them that beautiful pink color.  The adults indulged in champagne while the kiddos got enjoyed Sprite.  Seeing as how I never let my kids have soda (I’m a MEAN mom!) the Sprite was equally as indulgent for them as the champagne was for the adults!

Decorate Your Table

Whether you are having a special Valentine’s Day brunch or dinner, having a decked-out table makes the occasion that much more fun!  To fit the Valentine’s theming, we practiced some heart-shaped napkin folding and made sure to set the table with flowers and candle sticks we already had on hand.  I also spread out some Valentine’s Day stickers I picked up from the dollar store.  The table décor came together nicely and was very inexpensive!

Decorate Cookies

Another fun Valentine’s Day activity to participate in with your family is cookie decorating!  Whip up your favorite cookie recipe (we did a classic sugar cookie cut into mickey shapes!) and go crazy decorating with fun colored icing and sprinkles! 

I made a standard white icing and portioned it into three separate Ziploc baggies so the girls could pipe their designs on the cookies.  I used red gel coloring again (the same that I used in the pancakes) to make gradient shades of pink icing in each bag.  The girls had fun creating their own designs with the icing sprinkles.  I was really impressed with some of the designs!  They made it look so fun, I had to get in on some of the decorating too!

Exchange Small Gifts

We keep the gifts simple for Valentine’s Day.  Each girl gets a special chocolate treat.  This year, our oldest also received a couple pieces of jewelry and some personal care items so she could pamper herself.  You gotta love YOURSELF on Valentine’s Day too, you know!  Our youngest received some fun bath soaps and color changing tablets to make her next bath-time a blast.

Valentine Scavenger Hunt

To make the Valentine’s gift giving a little more fun, we have the girls embark on a scavenger hunt to find where their gifts are hidden.  My husband and I hide several paper hearts throughout the house.  Each heart has a letter written on it.  Once the girls find all the paper hearts, they need to unscramble the letters to learn the location of their Valentine’s Day gifts!  If they ever get stumped, we will give a hint as to which letter goes where.  This year, their gifts were in the microwave! 

Watch a Movie

We like to end the evening by taking it easy and watching a movie.  Bonus points if the movie has a good love story!  It IS Valentine’s Day, after all.  This year, we perused Disney+ to check out their Valentine’s Day recommendations.  Some good films we considered were The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. We ended up watching The Princess Bride – a classic!  I was also excited to see Ever After was another Disney+ option, so we ended up enjoying a double feature on Valentine’s Day.

Chocolate Fondue

I couldn’t think of anything more perfect to complement our movie than some end-of-the-night chocolate fondue!  Yes, I realize we are bordering on sweets overload here.  But isn’t that part of the holiday celebration?!  We made a simple chocolate fondue in my mini crockpot by using this recipe from A Year of Slow Cooking.  For our dippers, we used bananas, apples, strawberries, potato chips, and marshmallows.  Hey – fruit is healthy, right?!  The girls loved the fondue; it felt like a really special treat to end the night.

I hope you enjoyed these ideas for fun ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a family. 

Enjoying a romantic night out with your significant other is SO important – you deserve it after all!  But sometimes, spending some quiet quality time at home can be the PERFECT celebration of love on a busy holiday.

Do you have any fun Valentine’s Day traditions you share with your significant other or entire family each year?  I would love to hear them in the comments! 

Looking for other holiday inspired posts? Check out how we Celebrate New Years Eve as a Family HERE!

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