December daily: Christmas traditions

[resonant]

krait prompts: What Christmas traditions did you grow up with? Do you still follow most of them? What traditions have you started on your own?

My tree looks almost exactly like the trees I grew up with -- way too many ornaments, no discernible theme except "stuff we like." But my mother would never allow colored lights, and I love them.

Our tree topper is a gold crescent moon. We also get a little pagan with the Crown of Misrule, which I made out of felt one time, and which is now adorning the skull on top of the cabinet.



Every year my mom would bake a dozen different kinds of cookies. Literally only in the last couple of years did it dawn on me that that was because friends and relatives would come vis'tin' and need to be offered refreshments. When I moved out on my own, I made all these cookies and ... well, we ate them all.

The church I grew up in didn't have a choir, but I've loved being in church choirs at Christmastime, and I've missed it this year. It takes a lot of time -- but what better to spend your pre-Christmas hours doing than singing?

This year I'm reviving my nearly-abandoned Christmas card habit, if only so all my relatives will know my new address. There are 49 cards on the coffee table waiting for me to write them. What? Christmas is a season.

This year's Christmas is markedly less churchy than Christmases past, which is weird for the spouse of a seminary student, but I worked at the church and ran a committee and was heavily involved, and now I just show up and smile. I miss the old church even though at the time I was wanting a break from spending so many hours there.

Comments

[taliahale]

I'm incredibly jealous of your tree. My mother always puts up, count 'em with me, eight trees, each with a theme and decked out in grand, precise, HGTV-style. They're gorgeous, but we never got to sit 'round and slap ornaments on willy nilly, which I still find a bit heartbreaking.

There are 49 cards on the coffee table waiting for me to write them. What? Christmas is a season. Oh, this, a hundred times this. I'm sending out holiday cards in mid- to late-January this year. Why? I like to include a picture, and it's been four years since all of us were together at once (I have two sisters and a brother-in-law). I've done a sort of photo mishmash/collage the past few years to include everyone, but this year we're taking a family Disneyland trip, so I'm sure to get a decent snap of everyone.

[resonant]

That's kind of sad about the tree. From an artistic perspective I see the appeal of the designer tree - it would be fun to create one for a magazine - but our tree is our seasonal scrapbook, and I don't care about the esthetics of the paper mouse the kidlet made when she was 4 for the lady cat, with X eyes and "DED" helpfully written on it in marker.

[majoline]

way too many ornaments, no discernible theme except "stuff we like."

This is always the way we do tree decorating in my house too ^u^

[resonant]

And if there's some small keepsake type thing that we don't know what to do with, our default answer is: tie a ribbon around it and by magic it becomes a Christmas tree ornament!