<p>We all have little, simingly insignificant things that we tend to do around Christmas that make our families “special” and “different”. What are yours?</p>
<p>I throw a cookie making party for my DD and her girlfriends a few days before Christmas. I provide all the supplies and supervise, girls do all the work and take the cookies they have made home. They make sugar cookies, gingerbread cookies, even tree ornaments out of gingerbread. They LOVE it.</p>
<p>Christmas tree is picked up the Friday after Thanksgiving from a mountain tree farm. We go with friends and kids (total 5 of them) have a blast cutting their own tree. Hot chocolate and wine follows :)</p>
<p>Before Christmas Eve supper the youngest, able to read child reads a passage from the Bible about Christ’s birth. This is usually extremely funny, especially if the youngester has just learned to read.</p>
<p>On the second day of Christmas we throw a huge carolling party. Takes some time to copy and collate the music, but we all look forward to it every year. I sometimes have about 40 people at my house, all carolling :)</p>
<p>I absolutely love this thread.
We have a big basket of Christmas books to be read aloud, I put them out around Dec. 1. I also decorate with them. </p>
<p>We have a ladies potluck/ornament exchange. This is a Yankee swap event, and the stealing of ornaments can get quite heated.</p>
<p>We always bake the last batch of Christmas cookies on Christmas Eve to be sure to have some to leave out for Santa. We usually have some of the kids friends come over to help make them. </p>
<p>The reindeer get carrots on the roof, and Rudolf gets a pickle (can’t remember how the kids figured out that he liked them). </p>
<p>We always celebrate Christmas Day at home, where ever in the world we live, although many of our friends fly back to the states for the winter break. We have dinner at our house, and invite the guys at the office who are away from their families for dinner. </p>
<p>Sometimes, some of the kids friends come over in the afternoon to play with the new toys- last year the WII was a huge hit. </p>
<p>Essential Christmas food:
Spiced Cider
Mashed potatos
Crescent rolls
Cranberry sauce.
Pumpkin pie
Interestingly enough, the kids don’t care if there is ham or turkey, but the others are must-haves.</p>
<p>My H work takes their holidays on the days after Xmas until New years- in lieu of the rest of the year & we have been going out of town for twenty years for a few days around Christmas.
We drive for about 7 hours, to a rural area with much snow to stay at a family run B & B type place. When we first started going there- the owners had two girls who were around the same age as oldest. It has about 7 guest rooms & for the most part the same families come up for years at a time- it is fun to watch babies being born and growing up.</p>
<p>Even if we don’t take any other vacation all year ( and we often don’t because of work schedules) we have made it a priority to do this.
However- the original owners retired last year & we do like the new owners but it isn’t the same- additionally with the long strike this year & even holiday schedules very difficult- I am unsure if we are going to be able to do it.
I hate- the drive up- absolutely dread it- but I love the area. It is very relaxing.</p>
<p>Considering the nature of this forum, perhaps we should all be thinking about how our family Christmas traditions will be changing in the years to come.</p>
<p>Back when we were the children, there were undoubtedly traditions in our families. They had to evolve – sometimes painfully – as we grew older and perhaps moved away from the places where we had grown up, and as other changes took place in our families.</p>
<p>Now, many of our families are about to head into another one of these periods of change, as our kids move on beyond college. We face the challenge of creating new holiday traditions that will reflect the evolution in our families.</p>
<p>Kids put all of their own decorations on the tree. Last year DS did his very late at night on Christmas eve (because that is when he arrived home). Also…we have pics of the kids on Santa’s lap taken every year until two years ago (really!!). But two years ago, the kids agreed that a picture next to our tree would be more appropriate…so that is what we do now. These are all put on a sofa table in our living room and it’s so much fun to look at them both as they grew up from year to year. There are two copies of pics that have both of them in them…just in case they want them someday when they have their own homes.</p>
<p>Our very cool 15 year tradition is reflecting the growing of my boys and changing dynamic of our family. The year S3 was born, my younger bro (9 years younger) drove his pickup truck 1 hour to our nearby mountain on Christmas Eve at midnight, and sometime around 3 am deposited a large pile of snow on our bare front lawn. It was a ritual with a friend of his–including stopping for hot chocolate and buying lottery tickets, and talking about their iives. Our 3 boys have received their pile of Santa’s snow Christmas morning with delight every year, really having no idea how it got there. Some years it lasted longer than others; (last year, it was moved to block the small street in front of our house, and then S2 ran through it in my SUV!) It became more important on Christmas morning than any gift they received. Three years ago, with S1 in his junior year, and my bro now married and with a 9 month old baby, bro and sis in law invited S1 over , and asked him how he thought that snow arrived every year. He truly had NO idea. they told him, and invited him to go with bro that year to bring snow back for S2 and S3. They did for the next 3 years (and this was the subject of S1’s college essay) and told S2 about it last year, our last year of receiving snow. This year, S1 and S2 will get the snow for their now 3 year old cousin and her 1 year old baby bro!!!</p>
<p>Our Christmas Eve tradition dates back to the first xmas that H and I were married. I wanted to make a really special christmas eve dinner, as that would be “our” holiday, before we spent the next day with both sets of parents. But - we were still in college (gasp!!) and had next to no money…I tried and tried to think of something special that we could afford…no luck. We ended up grilling cheeseburgers on the hibachi out on our fire escape. Served with Ore-Ida french fries and a salad. It actually was really special!!</p>
<p>Anyway, the tradition remains (except we use the gas grill on the deck instead of the hibachi). Each Christmas eve day I go out and get some ground chuck, fresh rolls, and all the fixin’s - and the feast begins!! The kids know what to expect! </p>
<p>I used to LOVE to go into the local butcher shop on Christmas eve day, among all the people picking up their tenderloins, turkeys, and crown roasts, and ask for “2 pounds of fresh ground chuck, please!”. The shop closed, getting it at the grocery store is not nearly as exciting!</p>
<p>I love this thread. So many of you do such neat things! I would love to adopt them. </p>
<p>We always set up our tree and house lights the first weekend of December. Always open one small gift on Christmas eve. Everyone gets a stocking and the contents are individually wrapped. Always leave carrots and milk and cookies for Santa and the reindeer by the fireplace, and one bite is always missing from them in the morning (even though it’s been mannnnyyy years since anyone in the house believed in Santa).</p>
<p>And always the day before Christmas eve, I grocery shop with the kids, and it’s the one time of the year when anyone can put anything in the shopping cart, no questions asked (stuff we never otherwise buy or eat because its junk). So along with the normal food such as bread, milk, cheese, turkey, stuffing, etc., we also buy twinkies, doritos, cheeze-whiz, etc. This is a tradition because as a kid growing up, I did the exact same thing with my dad the day before Christmas eve.</p>
<p>We do goose because as a kid, my dad always wanted goose and its very moist. We always have yorkshire puddings. Always roasted potatos, roasted along with the turkey. And fresh made cranberries sauce. And everyone’s plate gets a Christmas cracker with a toy inside. Boxing Day, as we call it up here, we visit friends at their open houses.</p>
<p>We like to watch " The Christmas Story " marathon on TNT of TBS…can’t remember which. All of us know the script verbatim by now, but it is fun to have on. I also like to listen to my various Christmas music I have collected from both my childhood as well as more modern tunes. We usually get our tree about 10 days before Christmas. We live in an area that has a lot of Christmas tree farms and they are beautiful. I actually prefer to go to one of the garden centers that carries balsam , since it has more scent than the local trees.
The decorating has become a little bit of a dilemma that I struggle with…my oldest doesn’t get home until about the 21st, and wants to help decorate it, but we usually host a Christmas party or two before my college kids return. Maybe just the lights.
We like to stay at home and have a nice , quiet Christmas eve dinner. We have a retail store and it is usually pretty busy ( hoping no major drops this year ) My husband works crazy hours and even if he is on his way out the door and on his way home and a customer shows up, will stay open for them…
We like to have brunch on Christmas morning with the rare treat of bacon , quiches and Nissu ( a Finnish coffee bread that was always around when I was a kid growing up in an area with a lot of Finns ) All in all it is just a relaxing day with gifts, good eats and really just enjoying all being together.
My usually go up to Mass after the holiday to see all of my family, but I think we are opting out this year…kids just are not home very long this holiday.</p>
<p>I grew up with the Christmas Eve tradition of going out for Chinese food and then opening ONE present after dinner and we’ve copntinued that with our children. Enormous breakfast the next morning, with all the luxuries—croissants, bacon AND sausage, fresh squoze OJ, strawberries, champagne at 8 AM, chocolate, coffee with real cream—and then a massive orgy of present opening followed by afternoon at the movies or some other brain-candy exercise. Telephone calls to the appropriate relatives at some point. If it’s a nice day, a stroll. Christmas Day dinner is usually soup and toast or something easy like that.</p>
<p>We have one tree in the yard that has colored lights. My husband put the lights up three years ago and we have yet to take them down, so we just plug them in the day after Thanksgiving. We live in one of those neighborhoods where strangers come to admire the lights, so this is our tiny contribution.</p>
<p>My H insists that <em>everyone</em> in the world (except my birth family) has a fish dinner for Christmas Eve. That you have to “fast” and that’s fish. I am glad to see this is not true!</p>
<p>We are fasting on Christmas Eve, but the supper we eat, even though the only meat is fish, is the most elaborate meal of the year. But this almost deserves a separate thread :)</p>
<p>Well, my mother was of the same “school” but her theological leanings were such that this was more of an “I ain’t cooking” (thank the gods) dictated dogma than papal bull.</p>
<p>My father was a municipal firefighter, and holidays often meant the day was a scheduled workday. We would go out for a nice family fish dinner if he wasn’t working, or a late lunch/early afternoon supper if he was scheduled for the overnight shift. When he worked days, he would call in an order from the firehouse, the restaurant went out of their way because he was a fireman to make sure everything was always well packed, ready when requested and he’d pick it up on his way home. They’d always throw in a bit extra gratis.</p>
<p>Present openings were also based on his schedule, so sometimes we’d open Xmas Eve, sometimes Xmas morning, sometimes the night of Xmas. We never had issues with it.</p>
<p>In all the years we as a family have dealt with this, he still refuses to accept my wife (and kids) have similar schedules. She’s in health care, my son is a musician, my daughter is in animal care, so holidays are often normal “workdays”, yet he refuses to adjust a holiday schedule accordingly, insisting on a dinner even if all are not available.</p>
<p>Inflexible, selfish and pigheaded. Don’t get me started. I for one will be glad when it’s over.</p>
<p>Our extended family (often 20 or more people), gets together at a Chinese restaurant after the “family” Christmas Eve Service then back to someone’s house for Christmas cookies and gift exchanges. No one has to cook and we can all be together. Christmas day we can stay home or get together with in-laws. Works for us!</p>
<p>We get together with extended family for a casual Christmas Eve dinner and everyone brings a joke gift. On Christmas morning we have coffee, open gifts, then have a Hobbit brunch, alot of fun and very tasty! Then we get dressed up and go, ususally, to my sisters where we have Christmas dinner and exchange gifts, the adults draw names at thanksgiving, the kids get something from everyone.</p>