[I originally wrote this in slightly different form as a comment on Deirdré's post, "A 'Typical' Italian Christmas," but I thought it belonged over here, too.]
It’s been a while since I spent Christmas with my family, and over the past few days I’ve tried to remember what Christmas at the my family’s house was really like. Most of my Christmas memories are somewhat negative, to be honest. Dad was so controlling that it kind of took any spontaneous joy we might have had out of the holiday, and it often caused open friction between him and the kids or between him and Mom. He was actually pretty controlling all the time, but we usually didn’t have to be around him 24/7 like we did for two weeks during the holidays. We ‘loved’ him, or at least I’m sure we would have said we did, but we were always glad to see him go back to work.
Not everything about Christmas was bad, though. Mom let us out of homeschool as soon as the local school district’s winter break started, so we could lounge around all day and read and eat Christmas goodies and get even chubbier than we already were. And there were always lots of Christmas goodies: during the height of her ambition, Mom made snowball cookies (sandies covered in confectioners’ sugar), English toffee, German tea squares, two different kinds of cheese balls, and bought tons of candy and hundreds of kinds of flavored candy canes.
A lot of my family’s traditions are religious, which has recently caused some problems, since what parts of a religious holiday do you celebrate with an atheist? A lot of them are also German, since my dad served a Mormon mission in northern Germany back in the late sixties. For instance, on each of the four Sundays before Christmas, the family brings out the wooden Advent pyramid (similar to the ones on this page) and gathers around it in the evening to sing carols. As a more traditionally Mormon tradition, in the period leading up to Christmas they read the entire Nativity story together, beginning with the prophecies in Isaiah and moving through all four Gospels. Mom always makes quite a production out of it, actually. (As noted in this blog post, Santa Claus also never had much of a role in the family Christmas celebrations, as Mom thought he took too much of the spotlight away from the birth of Jesus.)
As for the secular traditions: If Mom had her way, she would buy and decorate a tree around the beginning of December, while Dad would prefer not to have a tree at all until Christmas Eve, when it would be set up and decorated all at once (as in certain parts of Germany). They have ended up compromising: Mom gets her tree early, but she can only put lights on it until Christmas Eve, when the whole family gets to (or has to, for the reluctant teenage members of the family) gather round and decorate the tree with Mom’s heirloom ornaments.
Dad has always been in charge of the present-opening, and (in an effort to make it more meaningful, I suppose) he goes around in a circle, letting each person open one gift while everyone else watches, and then moving on to the next person. This is fine for the big and/or exciting presents, but it gets kind of old when all the fun presents are gone and it’s down to deodorant and socks.
Since Dad was never willing to compromise on the pace of the present-opening, Mom eventually decided that the family would have to open some presents on Christmas Eve, just so the Christmas-morning ritual wouldn’t take ten hours. As more and more children and in-laws were added and the time involved multiplied, the start date came earlier and earlier, until finally it takes the entire week to get through all the presents. Monday is gifts from non-family, Tuesday is gifts cousins/aunts/uncles, then grandparents, then siblings, etc., etc., so that on Christmas morning all the family opens are stockings and “Santa presents” from Mom and Dad.
Mom has always been a huge fan of “stocking stuffers,” and each year, as her budget has grown, these became so numerous and elaborate that most of them don’t fit in the giant-sized stockings she made for each member of the family. So the night before Christmas everyone is banished from the living room while she fills the stockings with goodies and small items and then arranges the rest of the “stuffers” in piles on the couches and chairs, with each person’s stocking on top. Last of all, she covers all the furniture in the living room with sheets so no one can see what they’ve gotten before it is time.
On Christmas morning, no one is allowed out of bed until 6 am. For the children, this means they get up periodically throughout the night and check the clock in the kitchen and then go back to bed because it is only three in the morning, then four, then five, and finally six. (Since Mom and Dad usually get up around 5 am, this actually allows them to sleep in an hour on Christmas.) Everyone gets up at six, then, but no one is yet allowed in the living room. First the family has to make and eat breakfast—usually waffles with fruit and whipped cream—and then clean up. The younger children occasionally brave their parents’ wrath to make forays into the forbidden territory, but they usually don’t get very far.
After the kitchen and dining room are cleaned up, everyone rushes into the living room to search the tree for the pickle ornament Dad has hidden somewhere in its branches—whoever finds it gets a special little present. At last, Mom strips the sheets off the furniture and the family is allowed to find their stockings. Mom has usually gone overboard on the candy, as well, and at this point she passes out the sweets and nuts she couldn’t fit in the stockings. Everyone munches on this through the next few hours to fortify him- or herself for the Christmas-morning stocking-and-Santa-present-opening marathon, as described above.
As the children grow older (the youngest is now ten, and the oldest is now twenty-seven, with a baby on the way) I’m sure these traditions will change, and it looks like I won’t be there to catalogue them for you guys. I guess that way I’ll remember Christmas the way it used to be, good or bad.
