Your Family's Christmas Traditions
 

Anybody out there have some Christmas traditions, even unusual ones, that you want to tell us about?

Our family always has clam chowder on Christmas Eve. Then we carol and take homebaked cookies to the neighbors.

We also work at the local fiesta for underprivileged Hispanic kids and try to sponsor at least 2 families to make Christmas for them. This year, my Spanish students will take a family as well! Boy, does this teach middle-class kids to appreciate what they've got.

We also pool the money we earn from prizes at the fair and go to a Chinese restaurant during the holidays. (For "Christmas Story" fans--DECK the halls with barrs of horry, fa-ra-ra-ra-ra....)

We usually celebrate a fun Christmas with family and friends on Christmas Eve. My mom cooks ham and pork roast, along with a lot of other food, and we play the steal the present grab bag....makes for a lot of humor and hilarity in this house!

On Christmas Day, my parents and grandparents and I just started the tradition last year to get together at the grandparents for Christmas breakfast, and then we open our gifts afterwards....it makes it so nice to get up Christmas morning! :)

Christmas Eve service at the Moravian church...lots of great songs and the coffee and sweet roll!!

Christmas Eve we light the lumeneries on the path to the house and put out glitter and oatmeal on the lawn for the reindeer!

All through December we use those advent calendars where each day you open a little window on the calendar and see a new christmas symbol. We also have an advent wreath with five candles, light one every night the first week of Dec, and so on and read from a christmas devotion book each night.

My family is super laid back when it comes to Christmas.

On Christmas Eve we always go out for Chinese food and order Peking duck. I have NO idea why we do this, but we've been doing it my entire life, and I love it. :)

Then on Christmas day after we eat breakfast and unwrap gifts we sit around in our pj's all day and eat popcorn and watch movies. Everyone in the family gets to pick one movie, last year I picked Lilo & Stitch (yay!), my mom picked Changing Lanes (HORRIBLE!!), my brother picked Resovoir Dogs (one of my favs!!), and I forget what my dad picked...but it is soooooo fun!!! :D

my family is busy busy busy during Christmas! Both sides of my family are huge and they like to celebrate. On Christmas Eve we have christmas with my mom's side of the family, and usually at our house! We decorate the house so it's very festive and fun (i love that part!)

People usually start arriving around 4. Everyone mingles, has drinks (grandma's egg nog - YUM!) and appetizers. We ALWAYS have italian food for Christmas eve. I don't know why, maybe because there's so many people, but we've been doing it since i can remember. Garlic bread, bruschetta, lasagna, meatballs, italian sausage, big salad, eggplant. Lots of food :) After dinner the little kids go crazy because they get to open their presents. We do a grab bag, so everyone gets a present. After all of the little kids open theirs, everyone crowds around grandma and grandpa because they have a pile of presents in front of them! We watch them open and ohh and aww when appropriate (lol, one year grandpa wanted some odor eaters!!)

We have dessert, the little kids play with their toys, and there's always people playing cards or something. A lot of my aunts or uncles with little kids slip out to go put their presents under the tree (so santa has been there) because we all go to midnight mass together. When we were little and still thought Santa was real, we always got to open one present before bed after mass!

On Christmas morning my family gets up, has a huge breakfast with the fancy china and silver. Then we light a fire and open presents! Then we bum around the house for a few hours before heading over to my dad's side of the family. We usually have ham, turkey, and all the fixings. Again we open presents and all that hoopla. Christmas is fun :)

One of MY traditions is to go out right after Thanksgiving, charge up the ole MasterCard and wait for the Sh---- to hit the fan in January!!!!:eek: ;) :D

the day after thanksgiving we cut down our christmas tree

christmas eve we celebrate with my mom's family. when i was 7 a candle caught a silk plant on fire. i was the one who noticed and told all the adults so every year after dinner my uncle asks me if there are any fires everyone should know about. also we always take the little ones to my grandparent's family room where there is an entire wall made of glass and we look for Rudolph's nose to blink in the sky. amazingly enough there is always a red light in the sky. then santa comes in and hand out presents.

on christmas day we all get up at 8 and open presents, and then we go to my dad's friend's parents house and open more presents. this is where each person gets a christmas package consisting only of underwear and socks. finally we have my dad's side of the family to go to and after dinner we always play trivial pursuit, which my dad almost always wins.

The only real "tradition" that remains in my house is my mom being totally ungracious for whatever I get her (it used to be my dad). It's especially fun when I get the job of returning it.

I'll be interested to see how she reacts to the present FI and I are giving her - replacement dishes to her everyday china, so she'll have a full set of 12 bread and butter plates. We got them on eBay, so she can't quite return them.

After coming home from midnight mass, everyone got to pick one present to open.....the rest wait until after santa eats his cookies and beer and the reindeer get their carrots and water.


during the week b4 xmas my mom and i would bake cookies, sometimes there'd have to be a few batches to "get it right" for santa.

I always like opening stockings, b/c that's where santa put fun stuff like jewlery boxes.

christmas eve we have homemade lasagna (no im not italian!!) and have been since i can remember but i dont know why!! christmas day we go to the movies usually. im jewish so we dont really celebrate christmas the way yall do!! lasagna on christmas eve is a definite tradition though!!

We used to bake "reindeer treats" every year for Santa's reindeer. They were like little gooey oatmeal cookie concoctions, and we would set them out for Santa & reindeer. The year I figured out there was no Santa Claus, Mom still wanted to bake them...but I was like "I'm only baking them if I get to eat some, too!" because I had figured out that, after I went to bed, Mom and Dad ate all the delicious gooey reindeer treats! :D I think after that year we quit making them.

our family tradition is that my grandmother is dictator of christmas. :D

we always have either ham or turkey, depending on what we had at Thanksgiving (we alternate), homemade mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, just a lot of good homemade food that my grandma won't let us help make. we don't get to open presents until AFTER dinner, which usually starts at 8 pm. grandma decides who gets to pass out presents.

we also have other small things, like we always put up our "family tree", we always put up the nativity scene the night before christmas, we always get ornaments from grandma.

it's nice.

We go to my dad's on Christmas Eve. We have dinner and open presents. After all the presents are open we all head to out own houses. As soon as we get home the kids lay out cookies and milk for Santa, reindeer food and water goes in the front yard, and the boys open up the glass doors on the fire place so Santa won't get stuck.
The boys go to bed and Santa goes to work. We put the presents under the tree, eat the cookies, drink the milk, pour the reindeer water out and scatter the reindeer food. We also leave personalized letters from Santa to each of the boys, and I put baking powder footprints on the carpet going from the fireplace to the tree.
Christmas moring we wake up early and have breakfast (usually cinnamon rolls), open presents, play with the new toys, and then have a traditional dinner.
After dinner we watch movies.


-wendi

When I was growing up, we'd go to Mass on Christmas Eve. Dinner was fish (which is traditional). We'd have a fire in the fireplace (which we were always careful to extinguish for Santa's benefit ;) ).

I would get one gift to open on Christmas Eve, which was always my Christmas nightdress. I had some cute ones; my favorite was a red flannel nightie with white lace trim.

We opened the rest of our gifts in the morning. I always got a few little things in my stocking plus a few larger gifts. I usually spent the morning assembling my new Lego castle/spaceship/town/whatever. :)

Then family came over and we'd have a huge Christmas dinner. Turkey or ham, stuffing, potatoes, veggies. Plum pudding for dessert, which my mother usually tried to flame, with varying degrees of success.

We had a nativity scene, which we'd set up a few weeks before Christmas with everything except Baby Jesus. On Christmas morning we put Jesus in his manger.

We did an Advent wreath too.

Now, we visit my parents for Christmas, exchange gifts and have a big meal. My mother still hasn't learned how to flame the plum pudding. :p

On December 25th, we go to a movie theater and see a movie because we're Jewish.