Here’s a little something you don’t know about me: I get incredibly anxious opening gifts in front of the giver. I’m just not good at anticipation and surprises. I worry that my expression will be wrong or that it will seem like I’m not excited by the gift. And then I worry that I’m almost over-acting and not doing it very convincingly.
I also get incredibly anxious watching someone open a gift from me. And I LOVE giving gifts, love trying to pick out the perfect little sussy that will make someone I care about feel happy and known. I just get panicky and nervous the actual moment of giving. Weird, right?
None of that changes the fact that I LOVE the holidays. Not the shopping- I don’t even like shopping on Super Bowl Sunday wheel the mall is a ghost town- but everything else I love. Love picking out the tree and hanging wreaths. Love wrapping gifts. Love Christmas carols. Love those light post-mounted decorations that small towns put up every year. LOVE LOVE LOVE the crazy light displays in my neighbors front yards. And I especially love when friends with different faiths than the one I grew up in invite me to share in their traditions.
To celebrate the holidays I’m giving away three copies of the amazing Clara Parkes’ new book The Knitter’s Book of Wool: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding, Using and Loving this Most Fabulous Fiber. I can’t say enough good things about this book! You won’t believe the things you didn’t know you didn’t know about your favorite fiber.
To enter just leave a comment on this post telling me about your holiday traditions. When do you put up your tree? Do you open presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? What’s your favorite part of Hannukah? How do you celebrate Solstice? I can’t wait to read about the way your family celebrates!
Rule-y type stuff: One entry per person, please. Entries close at midnight on Thursday, December 17, 2009. The winners will be posted here some time Friday and winners will have 24 hours to claim their prizes by emailing Juniper Moon Farm at prizes@fiberfarm.com
Good luck!
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I love to drive around and look at Christmas lights all of December. We’re an -open-your-presents-Christmas-Day kind of folks. But my favorite tradition is that Christmas Day afternoon/evening my family goes to see a movie– it’s a family joke that my mom gets to pick and she ALWAYS picks a movie that has the bloodiest, dirtiest, grittiest, grimiest people in it and a super sad story line. One year it was There will Be Blood, then there was the Gangs of New York year, and Cold Mountain one year– last year was Marley & Me (sad).
It’s just my husband and I so we don’t have a lot of traditions. We usually put up our decorations around Thanksgiving. We do it before if he is going on deployment and after if he is home.
Holiday traditions…hmmm, so many to choose from…I’d say my favorite is my town’s Santa Train. I missed it this year because I was traveling, but can’t wait for next year. Hope I win!
We always eat appetizers at my parent’s house on Christmas Eve and celebrate Christmas day at my in-laws. I like to put up our tree as soon after Thanksgiving as we possibly can, though sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. We alternate years with a fresh tree and a fake tree. I’m definitely a die hard fresh tree person!
We try to put the Christmas tree up right after Thanksgiving. It is really fun now that I have two young daughters. They are 2 & 4. We typically open up presents on Christmas morning, but every other year we are in another state celebrating Christmas with my in-laws. During those years, Santa Claus comes to our house a little early, and we celebrate 2 “Christmas” Days. It is so fun to watch the girls get so excited about Santa coming!
Since I was very small we always spent Christmas Eve. with my Aunt, Uncle and cousins. We have continued this tradition and now my grown children join us and our numbers keep growing.
We all get bundled up and go for a sleigh ride where we all sing Christmas songs and laugh because not one member of our family can sing – but we do it loudly. When we get back to the house the sleigh drops us off and we give our thanks to the driver, who rides off with bells ringing.
Next we have a pot luck dinner. Everyone brings something and we chow down. For many years the matriarch of my Aunt’s family magically transformed into Santa and came bursting through the front door with a bag full of gifts. We lost him a few years ago but every year we all share happy memories of his jolliness.
Now we have come into the cyber world and the older kids help the younger kids track Santa on the internet. There is a site that tracks him by satellite – very cool! When things start winding down my Aunt’s mother reads “The Night Before Christmas” to all of us. You can hear a pin drop in a room with 40-50 people in it, and ranging in age from 3 to 80 something. In these few hours we all stop for a bit and regroup and forget for a moment any troubles we might have. We have weathered many storms over the years but on this night we do it together – with laughter, love and forgiveness.
We don’t really have a Christmas tradition, it depends if we go visit family or stay home…if we visit family its presents Christmas morning, and lots and lots of food and movies. If we stay home by ourselves (its just me and my husband), its presents Christmas morning, food, movies and letting our pet ferrets play with the wrapping paper.
we always put up our tree the weekend after thanksgiving, and opened our presents christmas morning. now that we “kids” are all grown up, our family does a white elephant exchange every year, so we can cut down the number of presents we need to buy!
I am almost 25 years old, but my favorite part of Christmas is still listening for Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. I like to think that someday when I have my own farm I will have a sleigh bedecked with jingle bells, and on Christmas Eve I will hitch up the horses and my husband and I will take a lovely moonlit drive in the snow while everyone wonders whose jingle bells they are hearing!
Ok, so I guess that’s not really a tradition yet, but I hope it counts!
We are generally not home for Christmas — we go visit my parents & my husband’s mom. Not a lot of decorating happens in our small house. We have a 3 ft. tree that I do intend to put up soon — with new ornaments so that if puppy eats them, she won’t be eating anything with sentimental value.
As kids, my father, who had his family somewhat late in life and never did get used to the chaos of four siblings, had us all convinced that we were Santa’s last stop. This allowed my father to sleep a little later than the usual family, then attend church and have breakfast, not that we all weren’t antsy as h*ll. Then, he’d send us all up to our rooms, because Santa clearly couldn’t come down the chimney with all of us sitting there, That’s against the rules. Finally, after he and Mother had put out the presents, he’d slam the front door hard (apparantly, Santa didn’t go up chimneys all that well) and yell, “Goodbye, Santa” and we’d all race downstairs for our presents. My sister swore that she saw Santa rounding the corner in his sleigh.
It’s not Christmas at our house until Dad brings out the biscuits and gravy for breakfast.
Baking cookies and listening to carols are my favorite traditions (usually together) and lately my grown daughter has been joining me for tons of both. My most memorable Christmas was in 1956 when my baby sister was born in the a.m. and my two other siblings and I had to be packed up and taken to my aunt’s house that night. We opened our gifts (Santa came while we were out looking at the neighborhood lights) and we were gone for 5 days till mom came home. Not my favorite Christmas, but by far the one I remember the most. We did get to take every single gift with us, but we missed our mom like crazy! We were 11, 5 (me) and 3. It was so hard! Must have been rough for mom, too. Baby sister always started getting little gifts a week before her birthday, cause mom was afraid her birthday would be forgotten the Christmas season. Sheesh.
My Mom used to forget at least one hidden package. So while putting away decorations she would find the gaily wrapped present and one or more of us got to open another one! WOW. My Dad was in the USCG. One tour we lived in a town that had a giant bonfire on twelfth Night to burn all the trees. Remembering the Gift of the Magi, My Mom decided to start really saving a present and giving it to us on Twelfth Night. If I don’t win a book it is OK, because just remembering those gifts received on the night the CHrist Child received his gifts was a treat. Those were special gifts and I still have some of them to savor. Thanks for the memory.
The Christmas season doesn’t start at our house until after Hubba’s birthday which was last week.
We normally go “home” to celebrate Christmas with our extended families. This year, we’ve moved home. So some of the celebrations will be at our new place.
While gifts are exchanged, it’s always more about the food and games and being together. Then, of course, there’s the “in-law of the year award.”
As a small child, I remember waiting with all the cousins to open presents – we tried waiting up until midnight, but were so sleepy that the parents broke down and let us start at 10 pm. On the 24th. Ever since, we have opened presents on Christmas Eve. The anticipation!
This year, the cousins ate bringing their children back, and we’ll continue the Christmas Eve tradition, I am sure.
My family goes to church on christmas eve and returns home to a feel good dinner of a variety of soups and warm bread. My children and their children exchange gifts on the eve and then they all stay the night to wait for Santa to arrive. Our christmas brunch has always been warm homemade caramel rolls, juice and coffee. It is just great spending that time with my family which consists of 6 children, spouses of 4 and 8 granddaughters. Blessed Holidays to you, Susan.
Most of our Christmas traditions are pretty run of the mill but we have two that I think are truly unique. The first is the playing of A Christmas Story over and over again as my kids and I put the finishing touches on our handmade gifts. This usually occurs the day before Christmas eve. The other is something that was started on a whim years ago but has really come to be a part of our holiday, the writing of the Christmas poems. Christmas eve is spent with just me, the hubby and our four kids. We eat a special meal and then before opening our presents each family member reads a poem they’ve written about the holiday season. When the kids were really small, the poems consisted of lines drawn on paper that the child read. As they’ve gotten older they’ve gotten very creative. It’s a lot of fun and the kids really look forward to it, even though the older ones are 17 & 18!
My husband and I were engaged on Dec. 8, 1991. In the Catholic Church, this is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It is also the date my parents were engaged, 30 years before we were. After the ring, we decorated my tree and drove around town looking at lights. Our tradition now is to try to decorate the tree as close to Dec. 8 as is practical, and to drive around looking at lights, saying “ooh” and “ahh.”
One of my favorites is “telling the story” when putting up the family decorations on our Christmas tree. It starts with our wedding ornament, and goes on to the family ornaments that represent the birth of each of our children…and it goes something like, “We couldn’t possibly be any happier, but then….” The kids love to know how loved and wanted they were/are in our lives. That’s what it’s about!
Let’s see, Solstice: we’ve been celebrating this happening only in recent years as the Sprout Creek Farm (Hudson Valley) provides a magical candlelit evening of crafts for children & adults alike (intricate paper snowflake cutting, popcorn stringing) and a feast of homemade soups made from farm grown vegetables, cheeses from the goats, and crusty breads to sink your teeth into. One year, we were treated to raw honey from the hives served straight from the honeycomb. It’s become a tradition.
Oh, every Italian Christmas is not complete without serving at least one persimmon. Buon Natale!
I want this book so bad!!! We open 1 present every Christmas Eve (always pajamas) from my mom. She has already washed them so they are ready to wear. We then have a full Christmas morning with abelskevers.
Tradition will be hard this year, but I am headed down to Westchester County, NY, on Dec. 22 to celebrate with Dad, and most of my siblings, the four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. It will probably be my 85-year-old father’s last Christmas in the house. My bro and I (provided the weather permits his flight with his wife up from FL) will cook Mom’s Danish dinner (God help us!!) to be eaten on Christmas Eve, and after the the dishes are washed and put away (back before dishwashers, it took forever) we open our presents and play bridge and poker and rummy and board games.
It will be just a little over a year since we lost Mom to cancer and it will be a tough Christmas for Dad. But I think the great grandkids, particularly little two year old Quinn, will make it fun for him.
Dinner is a fresh ham (large pork roast) made with crispy rind, apples and prunes, gravy, carmelized new potatoes, cinnamon apples, sweet and sour red cabbage, and cucumber and dill salad. Of course there will be Danish cookies, including Klejner, which is my favorite (very much like a beignet made with cardamom) and homemade Danish coffeecake and, of course, butter cookies.
This year, Christmas dinner will be at our house. As our lives have changed, we’ve made adjustments to our traditions. My step-mother will be here (my father died several years ago), and we are having a potluck to help spread the cost around.
The adults aren’t exchanging, but my mother has given each of us a book for Christmas since forever. (Small wonder I’m an English teacher.)
We open one gift on Christmas Eve, then have the morning just for us. It used to be Mister and me, but now it’s the three of us. This year it’s all about protecting the tree from inquisitive, destructo hands.
My birthday is Dec 17th so the tree is usually up by then. We have a “real” tree, right up to the 9’4″ ceiling of this old house. Now that we have a lake cabin we drive the 85 miles there and cut down our own tree. I decorate everywhere, including both bathrooms…yes, red and green towels and a green shower curtain and soaps shaped like bells. Even though the kids are adults we still hang their stockings every year plus one for my son-in-law. Today I am baking cookies. The house smells wonderful.
I love our Christmas traditions and love sharing them with my girls, ages 5 and 2. My favorite was that every Christmas morning, including those when I was home from college on break, my Dad would wake my younger brother and I up ridiculously early and proclaim, “Santa was here! And I think there might be a present with your name on it under the tree!” We always jumped out of bed and waited for everyone to assemble in the living room to open gifts. Now, my girls get up really early on their own but the tree is always lit and I am always awake anxiously waiting to hear their first footsteps out of bed to tell them of Santa’s visit!
When I married my husband I learned that he didn’t come from a family who had many traditions, or at least none that we wanted to perpetuate. So we set out to build our own traditions, some we adapted from his family but to our taste and some from my family and some we just came up with together. First, at the begining of December we get the calendar out and pick a date for us to take the train to the City (San Fran) and do our grandkid shopping, go to lunch and take some goofy photos of each other with the Union Square tree in the background. People see us take photos of each other, that they often ask us to take some of them too. Good thing that Lee and I will talk to ANYONE passing by. Another tradition that we started when we got married is that Christmas morning I make two quiches, one fresh crab and cheese, the other is shrimp and cheese. I discovered as I have gotten older is that gifts you get are not as special as the ones you give. Each year I cook my family a fantastic dinner, with all the trimmings and candle light to show them how much I love them and need them in my life. Those are a few of the ones we have developed over the last decade of marriage…
We put a stuffed ape on top of the tree; he wears the star as his hat. My husband rolls his eyes, but the kids and I just love our “Christmas ape.”
Some of my favorite Christmas traditions are: baking, baking, baking, watching my girls open the door to their advent calendar each morning and pulling out impossibly tiny ornaments to decorate their miniature tree, reading advent stories each night to keep the “reason for the season” in the front of our minds, knitting gifts for people I love (even though I swore “no stressful knitting for Christmas this year”), and opening the gifts on Christmas morning. Also, the season just doesn’t start for me until I have heard “O, Holy night” for the first time… usually sometime BEFORE Thanksgiving, unfortunately. : )
The nice thing about Hanukkah is that, with 8 nights to choose from, we can eat latkes with my family, his family, friends, other friends, and other family and still have nights to spend just the two of us at home (eating more latkes, of course).
My favorite tradition is on the night we put up the Christmas tree, I turn off all the other lights in the room and sit by the tree. I like being there all by myself. I love to sit there and look at all the ornaments and remember who gave them to me. I really love the ones from my own children but I also love the ones from my students. I sit there and think about how blessed I am, this will be very important this year because it’s been such an difficult one. I truly feel blessed because of all the love from my family and friends.
My family used to always have a real tree every year, until my dad just got sick of it. We now have our could-and-often-does-pass-for-real fake tree. Our ornaments haven’t changed in years, aside from adding a new one every now and then. Mostly, we have our hand painted porcelain ornaments, and some extremely delicate and quite old hand blown glass ornaments that managed to survive not only our yearly handling, but a house fire at one point many years ago.
On Christmas night we shut off all of the lights and get into our Pj’s before we open our gifts and eat lefsa-yummy.
The tree goes up as soon as Thanksgiving passes – the sooner the better! Traditions: we take pictures of our four-footed critters under the tree. They are the grandest presents of all! I suppose our one enduring tradition is buying a new ornament each year for the tree. We have a ceremony when we add it to the tree, as it is the last one added. Our ‘present’ exchange is Christmas morning. We have passed the “things we have to have” stage, and now it is more about time with each other and with those in our lives whom we love.
Wool is like a sitting in front of a fireplace; it speaks to your basic primal instincts. I am the first to admit what the Florida climate has done to turn me into a cold intolerant sissy. But for for about 30 days a year, I can envelope myself in these heavenly fibers. It doesn’t stop me from loving every minute of handling my yarns the rest of the year in anticipation.
We celebrate Chanuka–opening gifts usually on the first night with my kids and my mom. (can’t wait longer than that!) Then we celebrate with the cousins (latkes, brisket, tons of desserts)–which this year I made 3 knitted cowls that were VERY WELL RECEIVED. I made the manly one that I think got listed on this blog but works for guys and gals (I saw my Mom eying one..I might have one more to go). And then we celebrate Christmas with my high school gang of friends and their kids usually a day or 2 after the holidays. Ah–friends and family and food. All good things
We make a nativity tray on Christmas eve – there’s an old poem about going out to give hay to the horses, berries for the birds, etc (see Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book Simple Abundance for a much better explanation!) We come home from Christmas Eve service and we take buckets of birdseed and veggies and hay and cat food and even hamburger and scatter it along the fencerows in back of the house. It’s pretty cool to go out at midnight – so quiet and peaceful, unless we’re in knee high snow and are laughing at each other trying not to fall down! we come back in for snacks and then check in the morning to see if our gifts were appreciated.
One of my holiday traditions is to drive around the area one evening, drinking hot chocolate and checking out all of the pretty Christmas decorations people have put out. Simple, but fun.
My holiday tradition: wearing my reindeer antler-headband whilst riding the Holiday Train in Chicago…:)
On Christmas morning we wake and open stockings, have breakfast, and then go to church. After church we go for drinks at my uncle’s house with his family (champagne and smoked salmon, yum..), then back home to gather by the tree for present opening, and finally sit down to a delicious Christmas turkey dinner, with cranberry sauce, and flaming plum pudding with hard and soft sauces to go with it.
This is what we have done since I was a child, and over the years it has remained pretty much the same. Even though we are all adults now (four siblings), we (so far) still go back to my parents home for Christmas, which means so much to my Dad in particular.
The stockings are those that were handmade by my mother as we were born, made out of red felt with coloured felt pictures on the front (mine has an angel, my brother a christmas tree etc.), and always was stuffed with a mandarin orange at the toe. We kept the tradition of the stockings past childhood, expanded the ritual to include my parents, and evolved so that each person received a comics anthology, movies/dvds, perhaps a book, and truffle chocolates…
As adults, some quiet time in meditation/contemplation was an option for those who didn’t want to go to church.
It’s a lovely day, and family oriented. As we have our own children we will start our own traditions here, but meanwhile we gather together from wherever we are for this Christmas celebration back at my parents home.
One of my favorite traditions is setting up nativity scenes to celebrate Jesus’s birth. My family had one growing up, nad now my Husband and I have 6 or 7, each one unique. On Christmas Eve, we always have birthday cake before we open gifts. One year hen my oldest daughter was about 4, we had angel food cake, because it’s my mother’s favorite. That stuck in my daughter’s mind, so the next year, she said that we “always” have angel food because the angels sang for Jesus’s birthday. Thus a tradition was born!
I’d love to win Clara Parke’s book, because I’d love to give it to my mother for Christmas!
We have a lot of holiday traditions, but my favorite is Christmas Eve. We go out for sushi and pig out and then drive around our town looking at the holiday lights. Then we come home for Christmas cookies! It is always a great night.
Every year my Mom makes stuffed clams to eat while we trim the tree.
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