Hilary Duff Breaks Down Her Favorite Holiday Family Traditions: ‘Night Swims and Cocoa’ and More (Exclusive)

Hilary Duff is still working hard to keep family traditions alive this holiday season, even though her family will be spending Christmas on the road.

“We’re actually traveling on Christmas day this year, which is really exciting,” Duff, 37, exclusively shares in the latest issue of Us Weekly. “I think that I love the whole buildup of the holidays. I know it’s chaotic, but I really love being in town, all the festivities, like, we’re going to a holiday road and we’re going to pick out our Christmas tree, we always play tag on the Christmas tree lot. That’s one of my favorite family activities.”

One of Duff’s personal holiday traditions happens when her kids are out of the house. “We put the tree up together, and then once the kids go to school, I replace all of the ornaments and put them where they actually belong,” she quips.

Duff shares her eldest child, son Luca, 12, with her ex-husband, Mike Comrie. She and her husband, Matthew Koma, welcomed their first child together, daughter Banks, 6, one year before they tied the knot in 2019. They continued to grow their family with the arrival of daughter Mae, 3, in 2021. Duff and Koma, 37, welcomed their third child, daughter Townes, on May 3.

This year, Duff introduced a new tradition that’s fun for the whole family. “We’ve been doing night swims with hot cocoa,” she reveals. “It’s a little bit of a spoiled thing ’cause we heat the pool and get it really warm, but we’re out there doing night swims and cocoa. Sometimes I’ll have a glass of red wine. It’s really fun. We try to do it on the weekdays so the kids — it took, like 30 minutes, but the kids feel like it’s something special and it’s not a normal night around here.”

She adds: “We’re traveling on Christmas day and then we’re skiing, and that’s it for the holidays.”

While the holidays come with plenty of excitement, they also come with stress, especially for parents. “The burden is heavy for moms,” Duff tells Us. “I wake up in the middle of the night like, ‘Oh, I have these things I didn’t handle.’ … So, I’m getting slowly but surely prepared and [am] definitely excited. I love the holiday season so much, but being an adult now and making it magical for so many people is just so much.”

To help keep things organized, Duff is partnering up with Meta AI, which she describes as a “thought partner.”

She explains: “It’s just something that you can rattle your thoughts off with, and it comes [up] with ideas. … [If] my normal approach to this part of the holiday is a little stale, what can I do? Or [it can] help me get these lists together. ‘I’ve already done this. What can I add to it? I’m going to be in this part of town.’ It’s really amazing that we have this assistant for people that, one, don’t have access to a normal assistant. The other day I had to bring an appetizer and I was like, ‘I have this, this and this. What can I do with it?’ And it helped me.”

She goes on to joke: “I have a personal assistant and I even still need it.”

For more on Duff, watch the video above and pick up the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now.

With reporting by Christina Garibaldi