The Official List of Traditions

I mentioned my nostaglia for the holidays before. As the time for my family to arrive here at the ranch gets closer–and as I get more and more frantic trying to get ready–I have been trying to remember why I liked Christmas so much. Here is what I’ve come up with:

The Family Traditions:

On Christmas Eve, you got to open one gift before going to bed. The debate about which one to choose raged for days ahead of time. My sister and I would review and revise our decisions based on more than a grade-school kiddo’s fair share of overthinking. Like, ‘Mom says good things come in small packages…is that really true?’ Inevitably, we would feel we chose the wrong one…not because the gift wasn’t any good, but because we knew what was inside a box the minute it was opened and that meant the process of choosing was over for another year.

Every Christmas Eve, my sister and I would sleep in the same bed, crammed into a twin, so that neither of us would get up and sneak downstairs before the other. The funny part is that I don’t think either of us would have ever really done that because it would have been breaking the TRADITION. Get it?

On Christmas morning, the whole family would line up at the top of the stairs in birth order. Dad first, then Mom, then me, then my sister–last. You can see why I liked this one. I actually think it was originally devised as a way for my Dad to get down there first to turn on the audio tape. We have audio tapes of all my Christmasses growing up (but not movies–my parents couldn’t afford a movie camera and this was way before video).

Santa’s gifts were never wrapped. They were gathered in two distinct batches in the room, so that my sister and I didn’t get confused. We always did Santa first; then we turned to unwrapping the family gifts under the tree; then, just when you were getting that ‘oh no, maybe it’s over’ feeling, you would remember you still had a stocking to unpack. We didn’t eat until after all the gift-exchange was over…for which I am eternally thankful to my mother. I have heard horror stories about families who had to get up and march immediately past the presents to the dining room for breakfast. Yikes.

I also know that the unwrapped-vs-wrapped gifts from Santa is open to some debate. In fact, we’re going to have it at my house on Sunday night, after my sister’s kids go to bed, because my BIL came from a “wrapped” family…and we didn’t. My ex-husband’s family used to wrap, too. His mother had five kids, and all the gifts from Santa came wrapped in white tissue paper (that’s how they “knew”). Each of the five kids had a different color ribbon that designated which of the wrapped gifts was theirs (because we all know that Santa doesn’t have decent handwriting). So my ex, who was the oldest, had red ribbon; then green, then gold, then blue, then white. Each kid knew their color and could find their gifts.

I preferred to see Sean Cassidy’s big ‘ole teeth smiling out at me from his poster when I came into the living room in 1977. I *knew* that was mine too.

After we got to be adults, my mother would serve a huge pitcher of Bloody Marys on Christmas morning while we opened gifts. She made it well–lots of horseradish–and we would get pretty toasty. One year in my early-mid 20s, someone gave me one of those little jars of Herbes de Provence as a gift. The lid was taped shut, and I tried a bit too vigorously to pry it open (ahem), and dried herbs shot all over the living room. We had thyme and lavender in our hair, all over the floor, the couch, the coffee table…but it sure did smell good that year.

The day after Christmas, we would pile into the car and drive north to Pennsylvania, to my grandparents’ house, and do Christmas again, with my cousins. And with guaranteed snow. The 26th has never been the same since.

R.’s family had their own traditions, and I’ll mention one here: his aunt and uncle lived very close by his own family and hosted Christmas every year…his aunt had a creche set up on a set of bookshelves…and periodically throughout the month of December and into January, the three kings would be found to have moved closer to the manger. On January 6th, they would have arrived, crib-side. They were wily, active, wise men apparently. The kids, of course, were fascinated by this intrepid movement.

Hope everyone who is celebrating this weekend has a wonderful holiday. I am secretly breaking the rule about living in the moment and thinking about next year, when I will have Emerson home to share some of this with us.