I lost 40 subscribers??? EEK!
Either Bloglines is just weird lately or being sick for three weeks really hurt me. :(
At any rate, I need some serious love so it's time for a contest! Tonight I'm going to pick out some tasty sock yarn to give away!
There will be TWO winners. Not just one!
You also have two chances to enter:
1. Leave a comment telling me your favorite holiday tradition (family, funny, fuzzy or otherwise) on THIS post by midnight CDT Sunday, December 16th, 2007. You'll be entered in the contest once for this.
*and*
2. To get entered a second time, post a link on your blog to this blog (just the main page is fine) and click this link to email me, and include a link back to your post. (You MUST use this link to email me, so I can keep everything straight. When you click it, you'll see why!) Change the AT to @ and take out the spaces.
Dearies, I have to make you work a little. The prize will be enough sock yarn for a pair of tasty, toasty socks. You can work on them over the holidays if you want!
The winners will be chosen by random number generator on Monday the 17th. You'll need to follow up by emailing me your address if you win! Just sayin'.
Ok...GO!
At any rate, I need some serious love so it's time for a contest! Tonight I'm going to pick out some tasty sock yarn to give away!
There will be TWO winners. Not just one!
You also have two chances to enter:
1. Leave a comment telling me your favorite holiday tradition (family, funny, fuzzy or otherwise) on THIS post by midnight CDT Sunday, December 16th, 2007. You'll be entered in the contest once for this.
*and*
2. To get entered a second time, post a link on your blog to this blog (just the main page is fine) and click this link to email me, and include a link back to your post. (You MUST use this link to email me, so I can keep everything straight. When you click it, you'll see why!) Change the AT to @ and take out the spaces.
Dearies, I have to make you work a little. The prize will be enough sock yarn for a pair of tasty, toasty socks. You can work on them over the holidays if you want!
The winners will be chosen by random number generator on Monday the 17th. You'll need to follow up by emailing me your address if you win! Just sayin'.
Ok...GO!
posted by Jen at 9:39 AM
66 Comments:
My favorite tradition is the Christmas Pickle.
There's a bright shiny pickle ornament we put somewhere on the tree (usually somewhere that results in the tree being almost knocked over when someone tries to retrieve it). After brunch on Christmas morning, there's an announcement that there is a very special gift under the tree for the person who finds the pickle. Then, everyone gets into a starting line and races to the tree. Shoving, distracting, and all dirty play is allowed in order to successfully win the pickle present.
The present isn't ever over $5 and is usually something completely ridiculous (think plastic dog poop). But it's so not about the present.
We don't have a lot of traditions at my house anymore now that we kids have grown up and our grandparents have grown up, before it was going to see the lights at Opryland on Christmas Eve. Now I guess it would have to be acting like kids again and breaking the wish bone with my brother when my mom is cooking.
The pickle story is funny.
And by the way I wonder if people are using ravelry now rather than bloglines to track blogs. I still have you in my bloglines but I usually read your blog through ravelry.
I don't need sock yarn but if you need a little love, I can oblige.
You just rock!
Hmm. I don't really have many holiday traditions - small family that's been sort of shuffled due to multiple divorces.
I guess one thing that we do is go around in a circle and open packages, so you get to see what everyone receives.
My favorite tradition in our house is the buttering of the nose. On each person's birthday their nose gets buttered to let all bad things throughout the year slide right off their nose. :)
I want a Christmas Pickle! Wait, I have a Christmas Poo - it's a stuffed poop with a Santa hat; it's from the t.v. show South Park. I haven't gotten it out yet this year; I'd better get to it.
Now, that's not really a tradition, but this is. We have a little ornament that was given to our daughter (now 22) when she was just a couple years old. It's something that was purchased at a Church craft fair - worked on plastic canvas, is kind of a cube that has a face and when you squeeze the sides, the mouth opens. Every Christmas morning that is still the first thing my daughter goes for because there is a Hershey's kiss in the mouth.
p.s. 40 subscribers lost?! That HAS to be a Bloglines problem.
The traditions of my childhood are my favorites. I've tried to keep as many alive as possible, but since it is just me, my husband and my two girls now, it just isn't possible.
My mother and her two sisters's families all lived in the same town, so each year we would rotate whose house we would celebrate Christmas at. My mother and her sisters would always wear matching dresses, many times that they had made themselves. There were five kids between me and my cousins, and of course we ate at the kid's table. My oldest cousin finally made it to the grown-up's table shortly before many of my family members died and the gatherings stopped.
After we ate, we would all sit around the room, and the kids would hand out the presents. We would then go around the room letting each person open one of their presents until we were done. We kids were so excited about this part, we had to be told to stop eating so fast!
I remember the silly old movie cameras of the day...how the big old lightbulbs would overheat and pop, scaring the daylights out of everyone. I had the movies my dad took put on VHS some time ago and need to put them onto DVD soon.
I will cherish these family traditions forever and hopefully, when I have grandchildren and my little family grows, I can introduce them again. Well, at least some of them. :)
Thank you for this opportunity to reminisce, Jen!
Hmmm.... My boys have always gotten one small stuffed animal. I thought when they hit their late teens they would outgrow that. No, I was reminded just last year that it is a TRADITION! So, small stuff animals are in their stockings each year, still, at ages 17 and 19! :)
Personally, my tradition is to bake Nestle's Toll House Cookies while watching White Christmas and, invariably, burning that last tray in the oven!
Bloglines has been odd, odd, odd. Hope that is the problem. Can't imagine it's you!
stuffed, even!
My tradition: watching Shop Around the Corner....
I'm still subscribed! Hope you get your others back.
teabird from Ravelry
my fave traditions are just opening one gift on christmas eve and the meal we have. i still get excited about opening presents and im 32 years old. i will never ever not be a child when it comes to gift opening. materialistic sure, but even the little itty bitty things make me happy. i just get too excited to wait so my mom obliges and lets me open one early (if we are spending it at her place).
Bloglines was all wacky a few hours ago.
My favorite Christmas tradition was waking up first thing in the morning with my brother and sister. We would run downstairs to get the stockings (full to the brim, of course), bring them back upstairs, and open them up on my parents' bed. Turns out this was just a ploy designed to allow my folks to stay in bed later than 5am.
When I was little we followed the Cuban tradition (since my Dad and his family are Cuban) of having a late dinner of roasted pork leg and all the trimmings (rice, black beans, plantains, flan for dessert) and then opening presents all on Christmas Eve. Christmas morning was reserved for the gifts Santa brought.
All these years later my husband and I still argue over when to open gifts. He insists it's Christmas Day, not Christmas Eve. I always tell him he's oppressing me. It's all in good fun though. We worked out the compromise of one gift on Christmas Eve and the rest on Christmas Day. His family tradition is Turkey Pie. Big turkey dinner Christmas Eve and Turkey Pie for Christmas Day. It's a wonderful recipe for using up leftover turkey and everyone loves it.
What a fun contest Jen! Thanks for letting me go down memory lane!
Fun contest! I love holiday stories:)
My favorite tradition is one that really doesn't happen now.....growing up we would go to my grandparent's on Christmas Eve and the whole family got together. All the cousins would be there, we opened gifts from that side of the family, we ate and ate and ate, sang carols, at some more, the adults indulged in some "holiday nog" as my grandfather called it and it was a time to be together, catch up and enjoy the holiday together. Now that all the cousins are grown, moved away and starting families of their own, we don't do this anymore!
You aren't the only one - I lost 12 overnight and I have been whining about all morning.
My favourite tradition? Having a drinking wine and wrapping presents party with my two sisters. Unfortunately, since we are all married and live far apart it has been about 10 years since we last did this.
I give you love!
MY husband and I started a tradition between us where we buy two gifts for each other: one requested, the other a surprise. So at least we know we'll get one thing we want!
As for family traditions, I follow his family's traditions as I didn't celebrate Christmas back in Malaysia. But here in England Christmas Day with his family is food, fireplace and vegging out, but either Boxing Day or the day after that is the day for a long bracing country walk.
Everyone gets kitted up, booted up and parka-ed out and we go out into the wilderness for a good old-fashioned British countryside wander. To come home to a fire and cups of tea, obviously. :)
Thanks for having this contest!
I come from a large family [6 kids] and we usually lived in a two story house. Tradition was that we all lined up on the stairs by height with the smallest on the bottom. My dad had a 16mm movie camera [I'm talking REAL old school stuff] and he would film us coming down the stairs and wishing everyone Merry Christmas. It was always interesting to see who changed in the line up. Mom wasn't too happy when my brothers passed her up.
Usually on Christmas night we would watch the films from years past.
I am still trying to find equipment to copy these films to DVD or some media before they age too much.
My favorite Christmas tradition is going to church on Christmas Eve. I'm not a big churchgoer (christmas and easter pretty much now), but there is something about christmas eve service and singing Silent Night that makes me cry every year. I just love it.
Being such a young family we don't really have any traditions yet, We have for the past 2 years gotten up on Christmas morning and given the kids and cat their stockings, the kids sit and wait while the cat digs in his and they help him get his goodies out. So maybe that will become a tradition, wathching the cat go through hi stocking before we get to see what we got. And Here is a little Blog Love to boot...I will be back.......I love blogs.......Cat sent me your way.
My favorite Christmas tradition is my niece comes over and we bake Christmas cookies. She's coming tonight!!!
Mine is totally weird.
The first is that after we sing all the carols, my Great Uncle makes us sing "Let Me Call You Sweatheart" - goodness knows how that came to be a Christmas song! But after we've sung it through once, we have to sing it through again without personal pronouns.
As in, "Let . . . call . . . sweetheart. . .'m in love with . . ."
I know. Totally inexplicable. But my family has been doing it since before I was born, so who am I to question?
And every year there's a great aunt in the back of the group who sings the personal pronouns and everyone has a giggle. It wouldn't be Christmas otherwise!
I like christmas morning in general. My sister and I wake up, open our stockings (yes, I still get one) and bum around. Our folks get up, we have coffee and my sister is santa's helper, bringing all the presents to my dad for him to read out the name - then she distributes them. Once the carnage is over (it's really a very modest carnage, compared to many) we retire to the dining table for more coffee and breakfast - usually croisants and sometimes fruit etc (I live in Australia. It's hot)
Then, a few hours of hanging out, fondling our gifts, before the christmas day run around starts.
In a more firm, precise tradition, my mother and I have started exchanging christmas ornaments, one a year. I got cross that she had lovely, meaningful baubles, while mine were plastic from Target. This year I made hers, I've jsut blogged it.
Growing up in Australia, Christmas was at the start of the summer holidays. My family would always go get our live Christmas tree in the evening on the last day of school for the year. We went to a place in the hills not far from town and they always had kittens running around and hydrangeas in bloom.
It's tough to choose, but I think my favourite tradition is playing crokinole after Christmas dinner (and throughout the holiday season).
Everyone gets new pajamas on Christmas Eve. I don't remember why we started this, but the kids in particular love it, so we do it every year. Then the kids stay in their pj's all day on Christmas Day; the adults usually get dressed, because some of us go to the movies on Christmas afternoon before coming home to the big Christmas dinner.
Every Christmas we take our kids to pick out an ornament and they each have a box of ornaments they have choosen since they were big enough to, the reasoning is to have their own collection of ornaments when they grow up and have their own tree some day. We also date them so they can see what their taste were when they were 4. They insist on doing this every year!
My favourite tradition, small as it is, was that every year on Christmas Eve my siblings & I would get a new set of pyjamas -- my Mom would wrap them up in really creative ways (I remember one year my new nightgown was stuffed into a long wrapping-paper tube!) and we'd unwrap them, then go change before a last cup of hot chocolate and bedtime.
Every year, I keep hoping that someone will give me pyjamas on Christmas eve...
Love! I'm still subscribed, I promise. :)
My family moved a ton when I was a kid and then my parents got divorced, so we really don't have that many traditions. We would always get nuts, an orange and candy canes in our stocking and we would put the candy cane in the orange like a straw. It's an interesting flavor.
I know some traditions that I am trying to start now that I am married. I am getting a new ornament each year (trains right now since my husband loves them), and plan on getting one each year for each kid so that they have their own collections when they move out. I also want to do the new pjs gift that gets opened on Christmas eve.
Every Christmas Eve, my family would go to my grandparents' house and have a hot dogs for dinner. My grandfather always worked late while my dad was growing up so my grandmother didn't have time to make a big dinner, so when he got home from work, they'd have hot dogs, which are fast and easy to serve. So, we'd have hot dogs and then open the gifts that my grandparents had gotten us for Christmas. My brother, sister, and I would always open one gift from our parents on Christmas Eve and they were always pajamas to wear that night. I was always excited to get those pajamas. I still get excited. This year will be the first year we stay home for Christmas Eve because my grandparents go to Florida in the winter. They used to leave after Thanksgiving and come back for Christmas, but now they've decided that they are just going to stay in Florida this year. Growing up and having traditions change isn't any fun. Especially when there weren't that many traditions to begin with.
Christmas eve @ my Grandma's house.
My mom has 5 sisters so just a lot of aunts, uncles, & cousins. We always got the one gift from grandma....favorite year??? The year I received the soundtrack of GREASE an LP of course!!! I swore I would never get married because grandkids got to eat first. That is until you got married and then you had to move up to the adult table. What could be more fun than 28 people crammed into a small 3 bedroom home? Oh the joy.
my husbands family tends to get together immediately after christmas and taking a vacation together for a week or so. my MIL is a priest, so she works on christmas, and my sons bday is new years day, so that week after christmas s the perfect time for us to get together
My favorite tradition is one my husband started. It was our second Christmas together and we were poorer than poor. No tree, no presents, no Christmas dinner. I was pretty down in the dumps about the whole situation.
Late Christmas Eve night he herded me out to the car and told me ask no questions. Then he started driving. It turns out that he had been keeping his eye open for the best lit homes in town so he could take me out on our own tour of lights.
It was the only gift he could give me and it touched me to the core. We went home to our simple dinner of ramen noodles but my heart was glowing.
Since then every Christmas Eve night we bundle up and head out into the cold to drive around and look at lights. We listen to the all Christmas music station and just enjoy the time being alone in the world when everyone else is snug in their homes enjoying their families and the streets are pretty much deserted.
This year there are Christmas presents and there is a nice turkey for the table but the glow in my heart will still be there from this simple act of thoughtfulness on his part that keeps giving every year.
My favorite tradition is making Christmas stockings. Well, not making the actual stocking, the stuffing of the stocking to be more accurate. I love to buy the little goodies and such. And I love to open them!
The stocking is my most fave part of the holiday. !!! :D
At our house, where the boys are 6 and 4 yr.s old, Santa not only BRINGS toys, he takes old, outgrown, broken ones away. He recycles them into new toys at the North Pole.
The best (or possibly the saddest) part is that our boys rarely notice the missing stuff!
my favourite holiday tradition is having the rabbi over for christmas brunch. he is off work and no one ever thinks about it cuz they don't want to offend him.
he has a secret love for Handel's Messiah, as does my hubby, so they eat, drink and sing it at the top of their lungs!
very fun :-)
Well, of course, Gloating Day!
http://chappysmom.typepad.com/bookworm/2005/12/gloating_day.html
(Although, the whole, "spending time with family, presents, and good food" part is kind of nice, too.)
At the family party with my mother's side of the family, we always sing the Hallelujah Chorus, in complete four-part harmony. All the kids learn parts and the adults lead- there are about 30 of us, so we make quite the choir. Of course, my husband could not believe that we actually did this, so his first time at the party, he was asked to play the piano part (he is an excellent pianist). He made it through the introduction, we all started with the first Hallelujah, and my husband nearly fell off the piano bench in laughter. He scrambled to catch up, and now, I think it is one of his favorite Christmas traditions too!
My favorite tradition is that all the kids get to open one present on Christmas Eve, to keep them quiet and distracted. As I got older (I'm the oldest of the cousins) my traditional present was a book... then, as I read faster and woke up earlier, entire trilogies! I still miss doing that.
Favourite holiday tradition - our family (being dutch)has never celebrated on Christmas. We have done as early as about December 11 and as late as December 29th. It really puts the Christ back in Christmas and also, lessens the stress. Now that I have little ones, I am working on a way around this, but we have currently 3-4 Christmas's.
The reason I stopped visiting is that none of your links and pictures are showing up. = your header and footed don't work. Love you though~!!
some of our traditions have had to change and be tweeked a bit over the years. We moved from RI to HI then to WA... so the one consistant tradition is the tree decorating. All the ornaments on the tree are handmade (or almost all) and they each have a story to them. Many have traditional signifigance to areas we lived or friends customs in those areas...so to decorate brings back memories of events, people and places... gets me a bit weepy nostalgic at times!
duh... i will also post this for you on my blog!
When I was a kid we ALWAYS had hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls and watched A Christmas Story after we opened gifts on Christmas day... I still do that at my house even though it's just my boyfriend and I.
My family's holiday tradition ended in 2005 (spent in the nursing home with Dad) and 2006 (no more parents) was entirely new. When my parents were alive and well, we'd drive to my sister's in rural PA to spend the holiday with my sister, her husband, and their two girls (my nieces) who are close to my age (I was a late-life arrival).
It was a standard holiday--church on Christmas Eve, preceded by opening one gift (usually something nice to wear to church *ahem*), total chaos Christmas morning, turkey dinner with all the trimmings, then Dad would pop open a bottle of champagne. Even when we were little, we were allowed "a taster" (which usually served to knock us kiddoes out until dinner was ready).
If we were lucky, there was snow, and being from flatlands Ohio, the novelty of sledding down actual hills was a thrill I anticipated every year. Later on, my generation (me and my nieces) played cards with my niece's friends (beer included).
One long-standing tradition was that the three of us would receive sweaters identical in every way except size--handknit by my sister, who could knit complex designs without a pattern and could squint at you and estimate your size pretty accurately. There was a forest green cabled cowlneck sweater she made us one year that I wore out.
I miss those years. Now, we're all grown up, one of the nieces has toddlers, my sister stopped knitting due to arthritis/carpal tunnel, and my parents are gone. It really was Dad's holiday. He was the tree master, the Santa, and the one who really embraced the true meaning of Christmas. Someday I'll put up a tree again, when the sight of one is less painful.
My only holiday tradition, since my grandma died in '85, is to buy and decorate a tree on Christmas Eve, wrap presents on Christmas Eve, and let the girls open one gift before going to bed.
This year I am on call on Christmas day, so I may let the girls open all their gifts on Christmas Eve. And I am putting up the tree on Sunday! Maybe a new tradition...
When I moved away from my parents town and met my husband (almost immediatly) getting to their home for Christmas became very very complicated. His mother and sister are nearby and we've always spent Christmas eve with them. Then Christmas day at our house. My parents live far enough away that its silly to fly but the drive is a nightmare (as commented by my husband and my dad, the two drivers) and sometimes accident filled roads on holidays. So a few years ago my mom decided to have Christmas in February. We all get together and have a "christmas dinner", celebrate as a family, do our gift exchanging if there is any , and generally have a wonderful time! And what better month to brighten up with holiday cheer then February??
My favorite tradition is what we do on Christmas Eve. We spend that day in the kitchen making treats, and then that night we package them up so we can deliver them to friends. Driving around and looking at all of the lights is the very best part.
My favourite holiday tradition is decorating the tree with my family, especially my sister - there was this stuffed santa ornament that one of our dogs chewed the head off of long ago, his body left intact. So my father, my sister & I used to stick it in the tree anyway & laugh and laugh at the horror on my mom's face.
My father passed away a couple of years ago but my sister & I still have to laugh at our headless Santa. :)
My Favorite holiday tradition is taking all of our kids (my 4 plus 7 or 8 cousins) out tobogganing every new years eve. We bring them all back to one of the houses,make some hot chocolate and do karaoke. Then the adults get to enjoy themselves once the kiddies are in bed. This works well for a bunch of parents who have a hard time finding a sitter for new years eve. We always have a blast. The next day we usually all get together and have a huge Chinese take out dinner.
My favorite family tradition is sticking all the olives on my fingers with my brother on Thanksgiving which in turn gives my Mother fits and always gets her to yell at us. It still makes us laugh even though we are in our 30s.
Our family traditions are in a period of transition, now that we kids are all grown up and marrying, moving far away, and that sort of thing. Time to invent some new traditions that fit these times!!
p.s. I posted about this contest on WiKnit, my knitting contest blog
I love our tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve, after dinner, and then finding more surprises on Christmas morning, in our stockings. Never too old for a visit from Santa. :o)
Hee, Mel and I have the same Christmas traditions. My father is Cuban and my mother is Spanish, so our big family thing is roast pork, black beans, white rice, and yucca on Christmas Eve-- and a cake to celebrate my oldest brother's birthday, which is the same day.
My personal tradition since moving out on my own is my very small, very fake artificial tree covered in tinsel and skeleton lights picked up in a Halloween clearance. It's strangely festive, if lacking in ornaments.
My favorite tradition was our family's open house. We had in the afternoon on Christmas Days. Families would come and go. Kids would bring their new toys and we would all play. Mom would bake dozens and dozens of cookies and not pay attention to how many we ate. I should probably start that tradition in my own home because I have such great memories of them.
My family doesn't celebrate Christmas, but we did have a Christmas tradition. While everyone else was going to church, opening their presents, or eating Christmas dinner, we would go and look at the store decorations in the windows which at any other time required standing on line. On Christmas day you could just stand and look as much as you wanted. Similarly the Rockefeller Center tree - no crowds.
My family's Christmas tradition is on Christmas Eve, my mom makes lasagna and then we go to church. Then on Christmas Day we open presents and eat blueberry french toast and a kringle. Then in the afternoon we go to my aunt's house and eat appetizers like chips and little hotdogs in barbeque sauce. Then we eat dinner and then we open presents.
My kids are only 2 and 4, so I'm starting some new holiday traditions for them. There's candy in their advent Santa every morning (just a couple of skittles, but it sure brightens them up in the morning!) and there's new pajamas in each stocking on Christmas day.
My family celebrates Chanukah. My favorite tradition is using my grandmother's menorah. She's been dead for many years now and it is the best remembrance of her I have.
Getting up early and going out for a walk first thing to enjoy the peace and calm before the excitement begins.
For the last many years, my parents, and now my mother since my father died in 2001, spend the winter a thousand miles away from us. So whatever holiday traditions we had, are mostly gone. I phone, but of course it's not the same.
My family always went out for a walk together whatever the weather. It is one of my fondest memories of my childhood.
We have several traditions, dinner was not served until you could spot the first star in the sky, a wafer is passed to all of us, we break off a piece, and then go to a family member with our wafer breaking off a piece of eachothers wafers we beging to ask for forgiveness for anything we have done during the past year that may have hurt them, wish them usually health happiness etc, under the table cloth there is a little bit of straw, there are no more than 12 differnt dishes on the table, read meat is never served, there is always one extra plate set for the unexpected guest. After the table is cleared we open presents and then head to church for midnight mass.
Just subscribed to your feed (hope it makes you feel better) Found your blog via Ravelry and love your observations. Now for traditions: we're trying to start one by spending our new years eve on top of a German mountain with another couple and a buch of strangers. We have not even done it yet, but we are already looking forward to next year. LOL Well, maybe it doesn't count as a tradition, but it sure is going to be fun.
In our family, on Christmas morning, the eldest member present reads the tags on the gifts and gives them to the youngest member present to deliver. Each gift is opened one at a time so everyone else can see what it is and oooh and aaah appropriately.
Everyone in our family is all grown up and moved away, but we had a favorite tradition when we were kids.
My dad would always wait until the very last minute to buy my mom's present. He would bring it home on christmas eve, smuggle it into the house, and then my brother, sister and I were put to work wrapping it while he distracted mom. We weren't allowed to look, just wrap.
My favorite Christmas tradition isn't an action, but an item. My grandmother made felt stockings for all the grandkids. Mine is now almost 40 years old. The sequins are tarnished and the felt is faded, but I wouldn't trade it for any stocking in the world.
To carry on the tradition, when I got married, my Mom made similar stocking for DH and my DSS.
They look great hanging on our fireplace.
--Julia
Growing up, my sister and I would get to open one gift on Christmas Eve, and it was always matching pajamas that we wore to bed that night. Even though my sister and I are grown up and are starting families of our own, we all still spend Christmas morning at my parents' house. We all get to open one gift on Christmas Eve...pajamas that we wear that night. Everyone comes to breakfast on Christmas morning in their brand new matching jammies.
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