What are your Christmas traditions?

Work? It's Christmas Eve "Thank you for calling!" for the second year in a row :O

 

The most consistent one is bitching about the soulless commercialization of the holiday season, driven by our relentless corporatocratic overlords. :dry:

 

My brothers and I have to sleep in the same room, then the next morning around 5:30 my dad wakes us up while my ma starts breakfats we open our presents!!!!!! Then we clean the rest of the day or go to a family members house for the day. Last year my bro and i played santa and ate the cookies while my dad drank the beer. (please don't ask about why beer instead of milk)

 

My family and I do a secret Santa open gifts and my Grandparents used to come over, they're both dead now
That is only thing I really miss around the holidays was getting to see Grammy and Pops

 

I have to see A Christmas Story at lest one time during this season. And christmas day we normally open gifts then go to my cusins house to give my now 7 and 3 year old cusins their gifts and hang out with family then to my grandma's house for more gift and more importantly family fun. Then back home to get ready for a movie with family and/or friends....even if I get no gifts I just love being around so much family tbh.

 

I have this pillow with a picture of Santa on it that I only ever get out for Christmas Eve, then it goes away for another year!

 

some of our traditions include listening to my grandfather complain about there being too many presents under the tree, my mom telling my brother slow down as he speeds through opening his stocking presents so fast that hes not even seeing what hes getting, little things like that.

 

Mainly fun ones.

In order to make shopping easier for everybody, we draw names. Everybody in the family (my parents, my aunt, my brother, his wife, my sister, her husband, my partner and myself) draws a name, and that's the person you buy a large-ish gift for. Most people also buy small things for other people - $5 or so - but it's not necessary. We do have to buy something for my niece, too, because she's four and that's just what you do for kids, apparently. These gifts get opened Christmas morning if everybody's in town. If not, we wait until everybody IS in town before opening.

We also do a separate gift purchase - the white elephant. We find the WORST thing we can find, and wrap it in special paper. Then on Christmas eve, we put everything in the center of the living room, we each pick a present, we open it, and laugh ourselves silly about the awful things we've found. Then we have dinner, which oddly is always something different. My parents and my brother's family go to midnight mass - the rest of us don't.

Christmas brunch, on the other hand, is always the same. Apple-sausage ring with scrambled eggs in the middle, biscuits and perhaps a hash brown or some potato dish. We never have it any day but Christmas.

My parents get a live tree every year. When we were young, we'd help decorate it with a variety of weird ornaments of all kinds - the standard colored metallic balls, the four-color lights, craft fair projects, everything. On top wasn't a star but a cloth drummer boy - not sure why. Once we got older, my father decided he'd rather decorate the tree himself, and they usually end up with all white lights and all gold balls, or something along those lines. Certainly prettier, but the old way was much more fun, I think.

Lex

 

Christmas Eve- Go to Applebees for drinks and appetizers with my best friend's family. Then we'll be off to church, altho I've been away at school till today I'll be singing with the choir. We go to Applebees because that's the only place that's open in the evening on Christmas Eve. We'll get home and my mom, brother and I will probably watch a movie and drink margaritas or fruity martinins. Chex mix will possibly be eaten.

Christmas Day- Some sort of nasty sausage or egg breakfast. Gifts as family. Then in the afternoon we're going to my mom's coworker's house for dinner with her family. PS, this coworker of her's was my spanish teacher when i was in 9th grade. Haha.

 

Me and the rest of my cousins pull names out of a hat, kinda like a Secret Santa type thing. It's pretty much the worst tradition I've ever taken part in. It never stays a secret who got who (I don't car so much about that part), and the spending limit is like $10. That can't even buy a CD unless it's on sale or it's an EP or something lol.

 

My family has a few of the normal ones - wrapping gifts on Christmas Eve (in different parts of the house, though we always seem to find excuses to peak around at each other!), Church in the morning, BIG breakfast, opening gifts.

The BEST one though has got to be one of my favorites in the whole world. We put a stuffed squirrel into our tree after we put it up.

Now, it's a little different I know but can anyone guess where we were inspired to do this? Merry, Happy, Joyous Christmas!

 

My grandparents, my aunt and my two very annoying cousins come over at around 3 o'clock.
My mum, dad, grandparents, aunt, sister and me start talking about uninteresting things. My cousins and little brother go upstairs to play, come downstairs every now and then, shooting with fake guns and talking about spies and stuff. Then we have dinner. Then we talk, while the little boys go play again. Then the boys come downstairs and announce that they made a musical. So we have to watch a musical without songs for at least twenty boring minutes. Then my aunt decides it's time for my youngest cousin to go to bed and they leave. We're stuck with the mess, and as our parents are half-drunk, my sister and I have to clean up.
But it's still great.

 

Christmas Eve my parents, my sister, and I go up to my aunt's house to spend the day with my mom's family. Not many people on that side of the family, so everybody gets everyone else something. We don't really have any other traditions with them. Well, we always have pizza rather than something traditional like turkey. But that's about it.

Christmas morning, we get up and open presents at home. Then in the afternoon we head down to my grandparents' house with the rest of my dad's family. That side of the family is huge. We used to draw names for gifts, but we don't anymore. Now it's pretty much everybody gets gifts for my grandparents, and for anybody who had a new baby or just got married, and the grandparents get things for everybody. My grandma was practically buried under her pile of presents yesterday:lol: In the past we played a couple basketball games in the driveway (weather permitting), but my grandma broke her arm playing several years back and we don't do that much anymore:lol:

And the biggest tradition, of course, is the annual paper-ball fight. After all the gifts are unwrapped, things turn into an all-out war. It's amazing we haven't broken more stuff over the years:lol:

 

We used to have traditions, when me and my brother were little we'd all (family and friends) go out to a pub and have icecreams and drinks on christmas eve. christmas day we would open gifts then visit the cousins and them we'd have dinner at the house with our grandparents.

now my parents and i have moved overseas from the rest of the family we tend to do something different every year. i miss going for icecream on christmas eve.

 

Christmas eve is spent wrapping gifts and then off to the Christmas Eve Service at our little country church, basically a second family to me as I have been going to this 50 people church every weekend (until I went to University) since I can remember. Then, we come home and relax around the tree. Most go to bed by 11, but I love to stay up and turn the tv to the Vatican's Midnight Mass. I'm not a Catholic but I love the pomp and ceremony around the whole thing with all the languages, different people from around the world, cool traditions... its pretty spectacular.

Christmas morning is spent with my immediate family opening stockings and gifts, then a good fry-up for lunch. Then off to my grandparents house where my 25 closest relatives arrive to open a few more gifts and Christmas dinner!

I love Christmas!

 

Beginning last year, and for the rest of my life, I intend to spend that wretched day all by myself, lamenting the ugliness behind the consumerism. I don't give or receive gifts that day, but I do write letters to all the people that matter in my life - the letters aren't Christmas cards, just letters written to let them they're in my thoughts. The holiday falls at the end of year, so it is a timely day to summarize the year, all the ups, downs, watersheds, improvements, setbacks, descriptions of memorable days wrapped up in a letter that will outlast any gifts in terms of sentimental value.

It isn't worth it to get into the spirit of Christmas. Not if it puts you into a comatose state that blinds you from what's going on. Christmas is a very frigid day, so I'll probably spend most of the day sleeping/resting, and when I'm awake, i'll be sulking, avoiding any phone calls or text messages wishing me a good one. I don't intentionally do this, but the mixture of coldness, extravagant indulgence, and consumerism elicits the strongest sense of umbrage in me, and it's been like that for several years.

They'll undoubtedly invite me to their festive party but I'll decline, because going would only compound the sadness. The tradition I've started is spending the day alone feeling gloomy and eagerly waiting it to end. That's what Christmas means.

 

Every year we go to my grandmas for a night of family trash-talking, hugs and presents. Now all the kids are older...so now we go, hang out and open presents around 9:30 or 10 then go home. We used to wait until midnight on Christmas eve...but the magic has since gone away since me and my cousins are older.

Then Christmas day me and my parents usually go see my aunt who lives 40 minutes away, have a big lunch then come home.

 

wake up late, get on computer