Christmas traditions

[angelstarfish]

OK, so I’m really curious as to what my merfolk pods do for the holidays!!!

Here’s what I do:

On the first of December, I’m (usually) the one brave enough to go into the attic and battle the deadly fire breathing spiders to get to the boxed up Christmas ornament. After I finished slaying the horrid multi legged monsters, I decorate the house.

(Decorating generally consists of me climbing up onto the roof to place the lighted electronic Santa Clause next to the chimney, hanging up colored lights around the house and on the fence, and scattering lawn ornaments around the front.)

I “trim” our fake tree. (Trimming means to put the lights and ornaments on.)

I go Christmas shopping (usually at World Vision and Etsy.)

I wrap the presents and sneak them under the tree.

OMG I almost forgot about setting up the nativity set!!!

I blast Christmas tunes 24/7 throughout the house. (Sometimes I sing karaoke as well; sometimes I’m off key on purpose, other times I’m perfectly pitched.)

I mail packages to my cousins and other family members. (That is, if I didn’t have them shipped upon ordering online.)

On Christmas Eve, I hang my stocking. (Even Sam the Giant of a Moose gets a stocking!!!)

I go to the Christmas Eve service at church with my good friend, Mike.

I’m allowed to open one present before I go to bed.

I wake up bright and early on Christmas morning and wake up my parents with an ungodly hyperness that I rarely show at oh-dark-thirty-in-the-AM. (Sam the Giant of a Moose jumps up onto the bed in the middle of the chaos and gets into trouble with the pack leaders.)

I make breakfast (generally its eggs, pancakes and hash browns.)

I get out my camera to capture as much as I can on camera.

I only pause long enough to hand Daddy the camera so that I can dive into my own pile of presents.

I squeal like a little girl at one of those Dustin Beaver Concert whenever I open one of my presents and stocking, which makes my daddy cackle evilly and annoys my mama.

We (meaning mama, daddy Sam and I) do our own things for the rest of the day. (I normally go over to Mike’s house to talk and laugh.)

I also buy toys for Toys for Tots, help out the neighbors by wrapping presents, baby sitting, help decorate the house/ take down decorations, pet sitting for people who will be out of town and even going shopping for people who are too busy to do it themselves.



“You were born wild. Never let them tame you." -Martha Graham

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“Children of the sea,
Lie down your heads to sleep
As the maidens of the sea
Carry you down to the deep…”

~Mermaid Lullaby

[Fun123joker]

everyone but my family has the "open 1 present and christmas eve rule"
christmas eve first we go to mass (so we wont have to go on Christmas morning) after that we go a family's friend's house. I would go and play with the kids (im a young teen so i still do that but thier older now) and that night we would be there til like 1:00am but i ALWAYS track santa on the santa tracker. when i was little my brother and i would sleep in the basement and sleep to classical christmas songs on those music channels. I Love christmas morning TO much that even when young i would wake up too early. UGH we would have to wait 2 or 3 hours before my parents get up. during that waiting period we would find the gifts with our names on them and feel the stockings to see if there are things inside. for the rest of the day we clean up the wrapping paper and try to figure out how to work our toys. its gets harder every year with taking them out of the box and finding batteries and connecting game consels. some times said family friend comes to our house to chat.

we always get a real pine tree but we got a deal just yesterday when my mom gave around $72 worth of toys to toys for tots they gave us a real Christmas tree!

[SeaSister]

We also get a real Christmas tree every year. :)

Usually I'm the "supervisor" when it comes to Christmas preparations, but this year I'm living on my own and I don't get to go back to my parents' house until just a few days before Christmas, so I'm leaving it all up to them (decorating the house and yard with Christmas lights, picking out the tree, decorating the tree, etc. etc). I'm older now so I'm not as determined to drag my family out to a u-cut Christmas tree farm as I used to be haha. But we pretty much always go to a Christmas tree farm... we like to support local businesses. :D

I like to do a lot of baking this time of year hehe. Last year I went all-out and made a gingerbread house VILLAGE, which I want to do again this year if I get enough time. Now that I have the stencils for the houses all made up it shouldn't take up as much time as it did last year. My goal is to make one house for each guest (or pair of guests) to take home with them. Plus a few gingerbread boys, girls and reindeer hehe.

We also have the "one present on Christmas eve" rule. It was a tradition of ours to always watch a Christmas movie, too (usually "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" or "A Muppet's Christmas Carol") but my brother and I have kind of grown out of that now. Well, we still watch movies, just not the ones we watched when we were kids.

My brother and I are up at an ungodly hour on Christmas morning (even though I'm an "adult" now I still get super excited over the big day lol) and so is our dad... but he's usually up early. He and I have a cup of coffee and sometimes my brother and I get to investigate our stockings while we wait for mom to get up. Then we open ALL the presents and have breakfast, usually eggs and waffles.

Then we spend the rest of the day getting the house ready for having relatives come over (we have the biggest house so we usually end up hosting the festivities lol), vacuuming and cleaning up the mess of wrapping paper and boxes to Christmas music (because really, Christmas music makes even the most mundane tasks seem better). Then we have all have a big Christmas dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, steamed veggies, and pie for dessert mmm.

Man, just talking about Christmas has gotten me all excited. I can't WAIT to be done with final exams and work so that I can finally get back home and join in on the preparations. I love my family, too - we don't have any serious internal conflicts, which I am very grateful for. It's always really great to see my relatives. <3

[SeaGlass Siren]

I'm in charge of setting up the fake tree and putting up lights and ornaments.

Oh my parents also have a massive fight every Christmas :/

[sunrise]

For Christmas, usually we decorate our fake tree after winter break starts, with all these glass-but-the-inside-looks-like-metal-when-they-break ornaments, and our mom goes absolutely crazy about them. Personally, I think our tree gains ten pounds in glass. We decorate the side no one sees, and the ornaments have to be spaced right, with no silly looking gaps, either. It takes hours, with three of us working constantly, with four of us working. Sometimes we invite friends over to help.

On Christmas Eve we usually go over to our Grama's house (my grandma on my dad's side), and then my sisters, my mom, and I would take my Grama to church while any aunts, uncles, and cousins who came early cooked, etc. We'd get back, eat, and then we'd sit around and talk until everyone got there until everyone got there so we could play hide and seek, and open gifts. We used to have tissue paper fights so we could pretend to have snowball fights, since no one really wanted to go outside at nine at night in the cold. On Christmas day, we'd open gifts at home, and just spend time with our immediate family. Our mom's brother would come over, and we'd open gifts from him if he brought any, and catch up, since we don't see him often. My birthday is a few days afterward, so for the next few days, I'd be tempted by anything out of town relatives left at my Grama's for my birthday.

This year, we're getting together earlier, on the 22nd, and not everyone is going to be able to come. We don't go to church anymore because Grama doesn't want to go, and our cousins are all too old for the games we play, while their children are too young. A lot has changed since I was little, but I still like to see my family, even if talking to my cousins is awkward and little kids occasionally bite.

[Echinacea]

I get two Christmases. We go to Vermont and celebrate Christmas with my family on or around Christmas Eve, then usually the following weekend we get together in Waltham, MA to celebrate with his family. My husband and I are notoriously late, so one family tradition on my side is the family pool to see who guesses closest to the time that he and I will actually get to Mom's house... :rolleyes: We also traditionally have my mom's sour cream coffeecake for Christmas breakfast, and turkey for Christmas dinner. As we have gotten older, the wake-up time for Christmas morning has gotten later. My side of the family has a fake tree, but my husband and I traditionally go out to a small Christmas tree cut your own farm on the day after Thanksgiving to tag a tree for his mother's house. We go back and cut it the second weekend in December, and take it to her house, set it up, and decorate it. There are several ornaments on the tree that date back almost 70 years, from when my husband's dad was a boy. We have a lot of hand-blown, hand-painted glass ornaments from Pairpoint Glassworks, down on Cape Cod. That is another family tradition - going to Pairpoint to buy this year's annual bell. Usually we go right after Thanksgiving, and the owner knows we will be coming, and tries to have a good selection of this year's bell for us to choose from. (This year is a blue-violet glass, with 'On the second day of Christmas...' painted in white around the base, and a picture of two turtledoves painted in the center. http://www.pairpoint.com/2013--Large-Christmas-Bell_p_4207.html) I have a reputation for being a very decorative present-wrapper, which I work hard to maintain! My husband puts paper on the packages, and I do the embellishments. So Christmas is a busy, crazy, sometimes stressed-out time of year for me, but I love it!

[PrettyScorpio]

My Family has a huge party on Christmas eve then we open our presents at midnight.

[Joy&RaptorsUnrestrained!]

My Italian-American family tends to have a number of smaller christmas celebrations, ending in one big one.

My dad was doing business in the Netherlands when my sister and I were kids, and there was some talk about the family moving over there. To get us used to the idea, my mom and dad decided to introduce us to the Dutch gift-giving holiday, St. Nicholas Day, and so every year, we leave our shoes outside our bedroom on the night of December 5th, and wake up on the next day (St. Nicholas Day) to find the shoes filled with candy and small gifts (interestingly, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of the sea as well as of children, and instead of using a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, he rides a ship from Spain, while accompanied by his Moorish assistant, Zwarte Piet, who has raised some racial controversy in recent years).

My birthday is next, on the 15th, and we usually have some combination of birthday/christmas celebration during the remaining days before Christmas (since it is difficult to schedule separate parties). Usually, by the week after Thanksgiving, I've given my mom a combined Christmas/Birthday wish list, including where to find things (and yes, a monofin has been on the list for the past two years).

My sister always tries to outdo herself in cookie baking each year, but favorites include pizzelles. We also tend to watch a variety of Christmas movies, including the Black and White Christmas Carol (a favorite of my dad's), White Christmas, and some of my more recent favorites (Hogfather, Mrs. Santa Claus, Santa Claus: The Movie, Rise of the Guardians, etc). My dad sets up the lights outside, and my mom usually puts up the decorations around the house. We all go out together, about two weeks before Christmas, to select a real christmas tree, bring it back, and decorate it (I am usually the one to add the tinsel, since I am one of the few people in the family patient enough for that task). We also light the advent wreath at dinner at least every sunday, sometimes during the rest of the week as well. Finally, I make a point of reading our copy of "Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus."

On Christmas Eve, we usually have some combination of the Italian American 7 Fish dinner (usually smelts and calamari, sometimes some varieties of shrimp and crab, occasionally flounder or salmon, and baccalà, though everything but the smelts and calamari can vary). When we were kids, this dinner was always with my mom's side of the family, and the evening ended with each child getting a present from one of the other relatives (all arranged months beforehand via a pollyanna selection process). Sadly, when my maternal great grandmother died, the family instead started bringing various meals that only they would eat, hiring magicians and other entertainers to perform, and bringing in unrelated neighbors, and it all fell apart. As a result, we usually have the 7 fish dinner with my dad's side of the family instead, and instead of a gift exchange, everyone goes home after dinner, and my nuclear family goes to Midnight Mass (which I find peaceful and soothing).

The next morning we wake up (usually my sister, who is a much earlier riser than I, wakes the rest of the house up, after making coffee and hot chocolate and readying bagels and so forth), come down to the living room, and begin opening presents (which are usually color coded by wrapping paper to determine who gets what... presents for me tend to be predominantly red, my sister's are often green, and my mother and father receive gold, white, or rarely blue). We read cards that come with the gifts first, and dad usually records the present opening. We then get cleaned up and dressed (bathrobes and pajamas are de rigeur for present opening) and, after enjoying some of our gifts (we tend to have a large number of presents under the tree... moreso, perhaps, than most people are used to) and go over to New Jersey to visit another branch of my dad's side of the family (usually one cousin, who married a professional chef, as they love to cook for the rest of us). We will often give gifts to important relatives there as well (my grandmother, favorite cousins, godchildren, etc) and play with the little kids. We then return home, and much of the rest of the evening is spent relaxing or trying out more of our gifts.