It's A....Family Tradition

Christmas traditions. What are yours? How about family Christmas traditions? I want to hear about them. Here are some of mine. There aren't a lot that we do as a family every year, I guess there are just small family quirks, like my mom's side-Italian-my aunts are all loud and we all make fun of one another and usually someone cries. Yeah and my little sister Michelle is going to bring her boyfriend this year. Good luck Mark! I suppose this next one isn't just a Christmas tradition..but I have an uncle on my dads side who sings at every family gathering and Christmas is no exception. This uncle, Tom, who has never been asked to sing, sings mostly country songs and although he stays pretty current with his selections his favorites are the high pitched ones that get stuck in your head. We all usually make a huge fuss about it and use it as a punishment, as in 'you better behave or Uncle Tom is not going to stop singing'. And usually, any given Christmas Uncle Tom's singing would bug the heck out of me but this year, when I call home I'm going to ask him to sing just a little for me. It just wouldn't be Christmas, or any other family gathering without it. Another tradition we have with my mom is that she always does stockings for us. Actually, now that we're all older we do them for each other too but back in the days when she did them, they would be full of candy and other small toys or little things, and there would always without fail be an apple and an orange. Now, attention all moms, the last thing your children want to see on Christmas day is fruit. She told us something about it being healthy or bringing us good health or something, who knows I was too busy shoving the chocolate down to hear or understand. But two weeks after Christmas long after the candy was gone and toys had been played out the fruit would still be there and when we took down the Christmas decorations we would almost always have to throw away the apple and orange. Now that I'm older I would soo appreciate fruit in my stocking, because it's from my mom and who else would give you fruit for Christmas. :) The next one I wouldn't consider a tradition, it only happened once, but it helped me to understand that parents can be smart! lol. My parents are divorced and both remarried, my mom married a guy who had two daughters from a previous marriage and so we celebrated Christmas all together, four kids and two parents. To our astonishment the presents were wrapped and nicely placed under the tree early, a few days before Christmas. What were the parents thinking, surely they knew that we'd sneak a peak. When they were out of the room and we were all hunched up under the tree, we found out that maybe our parents were smarter than we thought they were. On each gift there was a tag with a 'to' and 'from' spot but instead of names written in the to spot there were numbers. Numbers! It was a Christmas code! How in the world were we supposed to break this code?! We went through every imaginable order, oldest to youngest, youngest to oldest, birthday in month order, who they loved more, etc. and there was just no sense to it. We were stumped. Finally on Christmas day we discovered there really was no sense to it, they had just assigned each of us a random number and that coordinated on all of our gifts, however, I still believe in the number in order of love theory. That Christmas as we enjoyed our gifts, we reveled a little, even if just a little at how the parents had really stumped us, they laughed the whole time.

This year I'm not going home (gasp!) and I am determined to start a tradition or two of my own. I am planning a big Christmas morning breakfast (pancakes, eggs, and bacon with hot chocolate) and also all the fixins for dinner and a very long, very early phone call home while I'm opening presents. I've also requested info on service activities like serving food because what gets you out of your own pity land like service!? Last week my friends and I went to see the Lights on Temple Square, which apparently is a big tradition thing when you live in Utah. It was beautful and welcomed in Christmas for me. Well, that and all this snow that has so nicely dumped on us right before Christmas. So Merry Christmas everyone, and let me know about those family traditions. ♥♥♥