Cassadee Pope Reveals Her Favorite Holiday Memories and Traditions

No matter what holiday you celebrate during the colder months, childhood memories and traditions typically flood the mind when that season starts to swing back around. With Christmas crawling up on us and the jolly cheer all around, it got Cassadee Pope thinking about the festive moments she had as a kid when she awaited Santa’s arrival.

Although Pope was a Florida girl born and raised, the warm beachy Christmas season never bummed her out because her parents made sure the house was more decked out than a candy-lined gingerbread house. In turn, the decorations then led to a grand discovery as she and her sister would know Santa dropped by with only one clue: candy canes in the front yard.

“Well, Christmas was super magical for me because my parents would go above and beyond,” she explained to Sounds Like Nashville. “But one of my favorite things was my dad would just decorate the house like crazy and line the whole roof with white lights and it was just so beautiful. Every morning on Christmas, we would look out—my sister and I—and the way we would know Santa came was our parents would tell us the elves hung candy canes along the little rope thing they hung up on the big candy canes that line the driveway. So the first thing we did when we woke up was we’d run outside and we would just see a bunch of candy canes hung up along the string that they decorated. So that was a special, little magical thing my parents did for us, which was great.”

Keeping with the traditions, the Pope family always made sure they went all together to a midnight mass (if they could stay up that late!) after feasting on a restaurant-style Christmas Eve dinner. Because of this, Pope never felt got overly anxious for Christmas morning as she was sometimes too exhausted at night to hype up the festivities of the next day.

“We always try to do a Christmas Eve dinner with a midnight mass if we can all make it through. We’re pretty tired at that point. But we love to have a pretty traditional Italian dinner on Christmas. It’s different every year. We’ll just go to some random restaurant for Christmas Eve and then go to mass. That’s really fun because we get to go home and go right to sleep instead of sitting around all night on Christmas Eve and being anxious for Christmas so we keep busy,” she explained.

Now that Pope has shared some of her greatest Christmas memories, Sounds Like Nashville would like to know: What are your favorite holiday tradition or moments? Tweet us @soundslikenash and let us know!