Lisa Ann Walter is sharing her family’s Christmas traditions — and why they keep things consistent. (Hint: So someone doesn’t get upset.)
“My daughter is so deeply connected to the traditions of the holidays,” the Abbott Elementary actress tells PEOPLE at the Out100 celebration on Dec. 11 in Los Angeles. “If I try to vary from them one iota, I will not live.”
The Emmy nominee, 61, hosts Christmas at her home every year, she explains.
“I always host. I have four kids,” The Parent Trap actress says. “They all come to the house. I cook every year. Everybody’s like, ‘Where are you going on Christmas?’ I’m like, ‘My living room.’ “
Christmas Eve, she says, always starts with her kids, Jordan, Delia, Spencer and Simon, going into her room to wrap gifts.
“I’ve carefully put all the wrapping paper away and they wreck my bedroom because they all last-minute wrap,” Walter says. “And then we eat Chinese food and we turn on A Christmas Story for 24 hours.”
On Christmas morning, Walter hops out of bed and heads straight into the kitchen.
“I get up early, I put the stockings out, I put all the presents out, I make cinnamon rolls. Everybody opens the stockings, eats cinnamon rolls, drinks coffee. Then we move on to the presents,” she says. “After the presents, the real breakfast happens.”
The “real” breakfast includes the staples: eggs, sausage and the like. Walter shares, “The minute those dishes come up, I start cooking dinner.”
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Dinner is another extravagant meal that includes turkey, wild rice stuffing with sausage, mashed potatoes, crescent rolls and broccoli with cheese sauce.
“[It] has to be the same every year,” Walter explains. “Or my boys will lose it because they eat meat, potatoes, and rolls and that’s it.”
One area that varies each year? The desserts. But this year, Walter baked cookies.
This Christmas was also the first Walter spent in her new Los Angeles home.
“I’ve officially moved in. I have some furniture,” Walter laughs. “Some of it is still out at the upholsterers, and I’m waiting with bated breath for it to be delivered.”
“This year, I did something that I had not been able to do in many, many years since the divorce took the last one — and that’s buy myself a house,” Walter previously told PEOPLE at Warner Bros. Television Group’s Fall TV event with Fenty Beauty in Los Angeles on Oct. 10. “I couldn’t afford it in Los Angeles, even being a working actress.”
The actress was married to her first husband, Sam Baum, from 1986 to 1999. The couple got divorced after Baum came out. However, the couple remains close friends to this day.
“Sam comes over every weekend, and as he left the other day, he said, ‘Bye, my sort-of wife!’ I think my kids would love to Parent Trap us and get us back together. We’re not sexual and yet my relationship with him fulfills a lot of needs,” Walter wrote in Cosmopolitan‘s “Sex After 60” special digital issue.
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