By Adrianna Willeford
We hosted a Great American Christmas 5th Anniversary Celebration Live Event to kick off the holiday season on our Great American Family and Great American Pure Flix Facebook and YouTube pages where the leads of our upcoming 2025 Great American Christmas movies joined us with family traditions, sweet filming moments, and sneak peek clips!
Just like all of us, our incredible family of stars share our love for Christmas and the traditions that make it so special! We loved hearing about their favorite parts of the holiday season and the sentimental activities that their families have passed down for generations and we’ve compiled them for all of you!
Favorite Things About Christmas
“Christmas Eve, being from a French family, that’s typically when we celebrate, so that’s my favorite time!” – Cindy Busby
“Christmas Eve! I love Christmas Eve! I love the day of nailing down all of the presents and checking everything off your list and then the evening of everybody being together. We’re always either with neighbors or family and it’s my favorite part of Christmas.” – Sam Page
See Cindy and Sam in ‘There’s No Place Like Christmas’ – start streaming on Great American Pure Flix November 30th and tune in on Great American Family and GFam+ at 8/7c on November 30th!
Christmas Traditions
“Merry Movie Nights is actually something that I came up with! It’s just a way for us to open our farm to the community and to people, to invite them to the farm to experience Christmas, kind of how you see it in the Great American Family films. It’s just watching my new Christmas film with me as a community, talking and being together! We have prayer, we have caroling, we have lighting of the tree, my dad comes as Santa Claus. It’s just an amazing Christmas night!” – Jill Wagner
See Jill in ‘Christmas at the Inn’– start streaming on Great American Pure Flix December 4th and tune in on Great American Family and GFam+ at 8/7c on December 6th!
“My dad every single year makes the same meal on Christmas Eve, which is so fun. And we’ll go to a church service and hang out. I love the quality time with my family. On Christmas morning, for as long as I can remember, we’ve always woken up and we’ve done a little sunrise hike with the whole family. We’ll wake up when it’s dark out and go look at the sunrise and the beauty of God’s creation and then we’ll come home and read the story of Jesus’ birth and revel in what the season is all about. After that, we’ll open and exchange gifts.” – Natasha Perry
“We started reading the Bible on Christmas morning! We’ll read out of Luke and the story of the birth of Jesus, but it really came out of when the kids were really young. We’d turn on the Christmas music and say “ok! You can come out of your room now” at 5am on Christmas morning. And all three of them would run out and there were presents under the tree and they would just start going to town, ripping them open, grabbing the next one. It was so chaotic, that we decided to slow it down and read the Bible and then each person would take a turn opening a gift one at a time! And we still do it that way!” – Candace Cameron Bure
See Candace and Natasha in ‘Timeless Tidings of Joy’ – streaming on Great American Pure Flix anytime and tune in for an encore presentation on Great American Family and GFam+ at 8/7c on November 29th!
“Tamales! We get Christmas tamales every year! My grandmother used to make them, and then my aunt started making them, or we’ll just buy a lot. The great thing about tamales is that you can eat them through the whole season, have them for breakfast with some eggs, later on for lunch, or even a snack later on!” – Mario Lopez
“I’m used to having a house full! My house is usually the hub of where everyone comes. My sister, her four kids, my mom and dad, and everyone. But I like the chaos and I like having the family over because I grew up with a lot of family. My dad had 5 brothers and 5 sisters, my mom 4 brothers, 4 sisters, so we’re used to a lot of family!” – Mario Lopez
See Mario in ‘The Christmas Spark’– streaming on Great American Pure Flix starting November 27th and tune in on Great American Family and GFam+ at 8/7c on November 28th!
If you haven’t yet, watch our Great American Christmas 5th Anniversary Celebration Live Event here!
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