Christmas time. The time to be with the ones you love? Well, yeah. How else would you come up with one of the most important parts of the holiday season? Traditions! You can’t be expected to invent them all by yourself, can you? You need to share them and talk about them, so that you can remember them and then spend money on them. Of course, traditions can be a part of our lives all year round, but at Christmas time they seem to dictate everything. Making this dark, cold and expensive time of the year actually colorful, meaningful and warm. But no less expensive.
Like you, my family has all our Christmas traditions. A hodgepodge of the holidays that has grown from nothing to become everything each yuletide year. Lets go over the list…
The Tree
Ok. This one is obvious. The Tree. But it has to be real. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without the hunt all around town for the perfect real tree while drinking something hot and listening to Christmas music. Of course, this has to be in December. Preferably a couple weeks before Christmas. No November tree for us. There must be the struggle to get it home and in the house. The wrestling to get it in the stand and up straight. And Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without needles everywhere and the challenge to keep it watered. One year the tree had bugs in it that kept wandering out into our living room until we could suck them up with the vacuum cleaner. Thankfully that didn’t become a tradition. After the tree is up our daughter names it and then the decorating can begin.
Ornaments
The first Christmas I spent with my wife, back when we were first dating, she gave me an ornament the night we were putting up the tree at my parent’s house. It was a Our First Christmas one. I hadn’t gotten her one, so over the next few weeks I found one for her and decided to give it to her on Christmas Eve. This started a tradition that is now in its 27th year. It’s been expanded to include our daughter, of course, so as you can imagine, we have a lot of ornaments. Every year when we get our tree my wife gives me and our daughter our ornaments, and on Christmas Eve I give them theirs. Generally, the ornaments are themed to have something to do with our lives in the past year. When my wife got her Mini Cooper, I gave her a Mini Cooper ornament. The year our daughter got guinea pigs she got a guinea pig ornament – and so on. We’ve also splintered off of this tradition to include getting ornaments when we travel. We have ones from Disney World, Alaska, Mexico, cruises and other places we have been. At this point the whole tree just consists of ornaments from our traditions, so every one has a meaning. It is getting crowded though…
The Naro
The Naro is our local old indie movie theater located in downtown Norfolk. It’s one of our favorite places to go to. I wrote about it here earlier in the year. I have been going there since I was an early teen. I even lived about a block behind the Naro for a year while in college. I have seen so many movies there over the decades. One of the highlights of the year is when they show the double feature of A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life during the few days right before Christmas. Our local paper wrote about these screenings just last week. It’s become such a part of their identity that back a number of years ago when the theater was needing help raising money for repairs and improvements they had a Go Fund Me kind of fundraiser before there was Go Fund Me. They named the fundraiser after Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life – giving the community the opportunity to help like they helped George in the move. It was a big success and the Naro got the funds they needed. We started going to the Christmas showings a long time ago and we started bringing our daughter when she was old enough to go. It is one of our biggest holiday traditions. A chance to go downtown at Christmas time, maybe get dinner, maybe go to the movies with friends or family, and hang at the local movie house.
Christmas Eve
So I’ve already covered how my family gets their new ornaments on Christmas Eve, but a bunch of other traditions happen for us that night too. First, we have the families over. Christmas Eve is dinner at our house. My parents come over and any other family who may be visiting. We normally have lasagna. Mulled wine is also made. After they all leave, the new ornaments are presented and then we sit down to read our Christmas books. This started when our daughter was real young. One of the pages of the books is near torn in half from when she held on a little too tightly during one page turn years ago. The books we read are T’was the Night Before Christmas, The Polar Express, and Olivia Helps With Christmas. We each take turns reading a page. After this we always go to the computer to track Santa…
Christmas Day
The one tradition during present time is to have music playing all morning. Once the presents are done we put on the Disney Christmas Parade show and have breakfast. Speaking of Disney, for many years as our daughter was growing up we went to Disney World over Thanksgiving. Christmas is already in high gear during that week, so we got to experience all the Christmas Disney had to offer. Our two favorite Christmas related experiences there were the Osborne Family Lights at Hollywood Studios and the Story Tellers at Epcot. The Osborne Lights were our all time favorite. They are gone now to make room for the new Star Wars land that is being built, but when they were there it was magic. We loved watching the lights and listening to the songs while watching the snow fall from above. Our daughter was always in heaven dancing around the streets chasing the snowflakes. One of the songs that was on the rotation was Feliz Navidad. Whenever that came on, my wife and daughter would dance together the whole time. In some ways that song has become a tradition. We even got an ornament one year that plays it. Whenever the song comes on now my family dances and remembers all the good times hanging together at the Osborne Lights.
The Advent Calendar
Around 5 or 6 years ago we thought it would be a good idea to get an advent calendar. We saw one at Starbucks that consisted of different size metal tins that attached to a magnetized hanging chalkboard. Each day there was a chocolate cookie inside until you got to the last day when it was a Starbucks gift card. The next year the tins showed up on the refrigerator door on the last day of November filled with all kinds of different candy. Our daughter loved it. Now each year the calendar returns to the refrigerator door. Candy can mostly be found inside, but occasionally there are earrings, or money. Gift cards, pins, or other little trinkets. It’s quickly become our latest tradition. This year even my wife has benefited when a tea advent calendar also appeared.
Christmas Town
Oh, Busch Gardens. About 10 years ago they started Christmas Town. A reason to keep heading out to the park after their normal operating season – to spend money and be in crowds and drink and even get on a few rides. It’s pretty cool, though. Right up there with their Halloween scare fest. Being annual pass holders we started going right away and have made it another tradition ever since. So many lights. So much music. So many people. And a lot of drinks. Peppermint hot chocolate, hot apple cider, spiked drinks of all assortments, lots of beer. It’s been fun getting dressed all warm and getting outside to get in the holiday mood just before Christmas. As time has gone by we’ve transitioned from hanging with our daughter enjoying the sites together – to her bringing a friend or her boyfriend and splitting up to enjoy the night. A preview of what’s to come, I suppose. My wife and I go off and have fun, though. Like I said, there is a lot to drink…
All the Rest
There are even more traditions, of course. Our simple light display outside lining our wrap-around porch. Like the tree, it can’t go up until after December 1st. There is the annual Gingerbread House. My wife and daughter work hard on that. This year it was a combination Halloween and Christmas themed – a sort of Nightmare Before Christmas house. My daughter being a musician, we always have a bunch of Christmas concerts and recitals to go to every year. It wouldn’t be the holidays without all the big performances. Then there are all the movies and specials to watch. I already covered the Naro double feature, and I talked about Elf and some other movies like Christmas Vacation in this blog I wrote last week. One of our favorite family traditions to watch, though, is Shrek the Halls. It is probably the most quoted show or movie in our house during the year. From “We’ve got schnitzel.” to “Now I’m all emotional” and “Donkey, I’m looking at you.” If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s because “You weren’t there!”
Merry Christmas Everybody!
