Christmas tradition ?

What's the *one* Christmas tradition at your house that you couldn't imagine Christmas without? I'm not talking about "having the family over to open presents", I'm talking about that one item on the dinner table, the one song everyone *has* to sing together.. that sort of stuff..

At my house, every Christmas morning begins with cinnamon rolls that are in the grocery dairy case. The kind you pull the paper on the roll and they POP open. :) As long as I can remember, the cinnamon rolls go into the oven long before I'm out of bed, and Mom has them baking away while I rustle awake. They're drizzled with the white icing that comes with the rolls, and we devour the cinnamon rolls while opening stockings. Not a single other present is touched until everyone has had a good hot sweet breakfast.

:) What's your tradition?

ANGELSONG, aren't you lucky to have the perfect Christmas name! I don't know if you would call it a tradition in the usual sense, but when we open gifts the one that makes the recipient cry, the giver is the winner. This is probably hard to understand, but it is funny. The winning gifts are always sentimental. My best cry was the Christmas my daughter gave me the ring her father had given me the year before we married. After he passed away the stone had been lost and I put it away. She had a new stone mounted in it that looked identical to the lost one, and when I opened the box, the tears of joy and memories made her the clear winner that year, and I was teased for being "Mushy Mother"
Pati

OOOO those are both great. Im a mushy mother too all year long LOL my kids just roll their eyes at me now about it it happens so much.
I guess the one tradition we have that goes back a little ways is every year I search high and low for those big candy cane sticks. The kids have to have one in their stockings every year. It started with my dad who wasnt very big on showing his emotions but he gave us small things all the time just so we would know. Every year mom did all the shopping but dad made sure we always had that big candy stick in our stockings no matter what.
The only other one we dont do anymore, "sigh", when my grandparents were alive it was being at her house for Christmas in W.V. with all the family there. Sleeping in any spot you could grab. The crowd was always hugs, friendly, talking and bustling, with any male in the living room watching football and all the females in the kitchen talking and cooking. I learned quite alot in that kitchen and Im not talking just about cooking either. LOL

Just DH and I now and I still do the traditional breakfast we have on all important holidays. When the children were small I was concerned about how well they would eat at all the family get togethers at which meals were loaded with sugar and usually no where near our somewhat scheduled times. So I began making a breakfast of English Monkey(eggs, cheese, bread, milk, chopped onions, & scrambled & browned sausage), cranberry nut bread and orange juice. There was also lots of grapes, bananas, etc. on hand. I figured if I could get them started on the day with a good nourishing breakfast and snacks the rest of t he day's meals wouldn't be so important.

My special Christmas tradition is a private one on Christmas Eve. I go to bed early, and am surrounded by the peace and quiet that envelopes the world only on that one night. It is as if the whole world is awaiting His birth. And I want to be part of that holy moment.

When my grandparents were alive, we did Christmas in a big way. Grandma would make cranberry pot roast for Christmas Eve dinner and we'd have cherries jubilee for dessert (flaming and everything). She'd set out her pewter dinnerware and we'd dress up and have that special meal together.

After Grandma died, we no longer had the fancy doings. When Grandpa died, they died even more.

I married into Howie's big family and things were different there, very informal with paper plates balanced on our laps. I really missed the special holiday dinners with my family.

He knew this, and started making a special dinner of roast turkey and all the fixings, just so I'd have that again. :) It's grown into a yearly event we share with our best friends. We call it the Holiday Feast and it takes place as early in December as we can manage.

It's gone from a more formal affair to a casual dinner with them (paper plates, not balanced on our laps, but on the huge coffee table!). It's really come to mean a lot to all of us, and it's not the Christmas season until we've had our kick-off together!

This message was edited Dec 18, 2003 6:34 PM

before I was on my own, my favorite thing was going to open house to visit. Then off to another. Then the whole town always ended at my brother and sil's house for desserts and egg nog.She was the mayor of the little town. After I got married we started the tamale, spanish rice, beans and all that other good mexican food. Been way over 30 years. Hope after I'm gone they will keep up the tradition. I'm sure they will. Always the same eggnog but not for the kids till they get 21. I possted it on the eggnog page. With my experience it doesn't take long to make it. And to anyone who wants to try it: when it says a fifth of Old Charter it really means a litter. That's what it used to be called, a fifth.

We have one from both sides of the family...from my side, my mom always, for as long as I can remember, made her "filled cookies"--every Christmas. Cookies filled with nuts and raisins and brown sugar filling. My mom passed on five years ago (can it be that long??), but we continue that tradition in our own family and my sister-in-law sends us (each of the six "kids") all a box of mom's cookies, using the same recipe, as a way of telling us we are all still family and as a way of remembering mom at Christmas. The other thing we do is whistle "Silent Night" on Christmas Day. My mom loved to whistle and did it beautifully--and "Silent Night" was her favorite Christmas song....
On my husband's side, we always had homemade vegetable soup for Christams Eve dinner. That was my mom(-in-laws)'s family tradition that has been carried on through ours...she also died the same year my mom did, within 5 weeks of each other. But we continue to have my husband's sisters and their families gather together for homemade vegetable soup each Christmas Eve. We decorate our tree with her favorite decorations and even though we think of both of our moms every day, Christmas is a special time of remembering.

GARDENWIFE, don't want to interrupt the thread, could you post the Cranberry Pot Roast receipt somewhere?
Pati

our family tradition is on christmas eve. all the family gets together to eat fish. squid, octapus, clams, and what ever else we can think of. and of corse our christmas bread that did make it into the cook book "quaranta hoilday bread". it would not be christmas without it.

Oh, my mom will have to do that! :) I'll ask her to post it.

Thanks a heap GW
Pati

Well, a tradition that my DH's family has and one that I've adopted for the last 15 years is making lefsa. It is a German potatoe bread. It's thinner then a tortilla and is eaten with Christmas dinner. You make them by the dozens and roll them up in plastic papers in packages of twelve and then in a pretty cloth. We give them to friends and send them to family memebers that were unable to come. I think that it must be a German tradition that came with my DMIL. It's a 3 day production and really seems to bring the family together.

Our immediate family (DH & I & two grown sons) has been in such a state of flux over the past 13-15 years, it's been really difficult to establish traditions. When we lived in the same state as the rest of our siblings/parents, we'd all have a great holiday dinner on the Sunday before Christmas, then the 25th was personal and spent with the inlaws. Then we moved 1300 miles from all of them, in the early 80's.
When our elder son married and was in the Army, we never got to share the Day with them, and it was just the remaining 3 of us, for 10 years. When younger son graduated, attended college and moved into his own apartment(s), he'd wax nostalgic and feel sorry for us, so he began showing up on the Eve with a bottle or two of wine for us all to share, then go back home ... of course, THEN he'd ring our doorbell @ 5:30am 'cuz he couldn't wait to open gifts together. hehe. He married a real doll 3 years ago, and the 4 of us have continued our wine/Eve tradition, and then share dinner with HER parents on Christmas Day. That's brought a great deal of joy, being surrounded by a large family once again.
NOW !! YAY !!! Elder son, DW, and our two grandaughters have moved to within 10 minutes of us, so we are desperately discussing how to incorporate THEIR traditions with OURS. We still haven't gotten our 'acts' together, yet, and we only have a few days to do so ! hehe. Thinking of meeting for wine on the Eve, but not sure if we will extend that to gift-opening, with the g-girls, and then let them have a quiet Day of their own.. sigh. What a 'horrible' problem, eh? HAHAHA.
MAYBE this year WILL be a beginning for a new thing, but that's yet to be established. Thanks for this thread; as I may begin to incorporate one or two of YOUR ideas, at this stage in our family's lives :) We will see.
Blessings, Pambi 8^)