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Thread: What are your family Christmas traditions?

  1. #21
    My name is Yoshikage Kira's Avatar
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    My sister and I started a new one
    we print off and hide pictures of Jesus

    whoever finds a Jesus has to take a shot.
    Makes for a lot of christmas fun


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  3. #22
    Double.Trouble's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Harvest Goddess View Post
    My mom loves to make us decorate the tree - so she can rearrange it each time.

    But my parents also do Christmas flamingos and we do Christmas casserole breakfast

    Other than that - we just like to spend the time together tbh
    Awww I miss decorating the tree with my parents! Ours would let my sis and I decorate first with our ornaments, then my mom and dad would finish it off with their ornament collection. We all together had so many ornaments that built up over the years and eventually we couldn't fit them all. My mom in particular had a large collection of Hallmark ones dating back to the 1970s....Frosty Friends or something? Some were rare and worth a chunk of change.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by morecoffeepls View Post
    My family tends to have some pretty interesting traditions. I always enjoy them until aunt glenda has be dramatic(lol...):
    -> Yankee swap with more chaotic rules(aka, getting a number doesn't mean you have more power). The gifts are usually kept under 20 since it's meant for fun over dazzle factor.

    -> Hidden Santa's - My grandfather would always hide between 5 and 10 santa's in the house for the kids(and adults to find). It was a fun little thing to keep everyone busy while dinner was being finished.

    -> My personal favorite, the anti-holiday holiday party. Yes, the title makes no sense. Each year someone in my family hosts this party and the rules are simple: do not say any holiday words. Everyone is given 10-20 popsicle sticks and the goal is to accumulate as many as possible before the party ends. Every time you hear someone say a holiday word(eg Santa, presents, Christmas, Hanukkah), you take a stick. The person who has the most sticks by the end of the evening wins. Basically by the middle of the evening it turns into a blood bath of people baiting others to say words. Or couples working together to strategically gain sticks. Always fun.
    That last game sounds like so much fun!

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Columbidae View Post
    We grew up poor.

    So when I started working I would just buy whatever I wanted.
    If my siblings wanted something I'd get it for them.

    It's carried over into my marriage where we both don't really celebrate Christmas but we love to decorate for it.

    When ever we want something we get it for each other through out the year.

    Our families are spread out. So getting together for a dinner isn't realistic...
    This year I'll be working 16 hours of Christmas any ways. Double pay for the holiday.
    Same with new years.
    I haven't taken time off for Christmas in years. We do get Christmas Day off, and New Year's. Christmas Eve is usually a chill half day, before Covid we would have a bunch of liquor and eggnog in the office so not a lot of work gets done anyways lol.
    But yeah, double pay sounds nice!
    "when I say acab, I include tony p"

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  5. #23
    Danny Phantom's Avatar
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    Oh boy, Christmas is a HUGE thing for my family, especially on my mother's side. She has 3 siblings, and all of our families get together at my grandma's for Christmas eve. Our "tradition" is to be, well, not traditional. We like to switch things up every year, from the way we play secret santa (we already did mimics, saying what objetcs/animals/etc the person would be, and our current favorite: we tell a funny story we shared with the person we got) to how we spend the evening. I'll use the last two years we celebrated (2018 and 2019) as examples - in 2018, we divided ourselves in two groups and my grandma hosted a variety of games, like scavenger hunts, pictionary, races, etc. with a Christmas theme for us to compete in. In 2019, we had a "Christmas Carnaval" - my uncle brought lots of instruments so everyone could play one, we got custom T-shirts made and we even made a flag from scratch.

    The best part? I'm the youngest and I'm sitting in my mid-20s already, so it's just a bunch of grown-ass people having some fun and being loud, we DEFINITELY don't do this "for the children".
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  7. #24
    Druid's Avatar
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    We're pretty low-key but we do have a few!
    • Stockings on the mantle on Christmas Eve, which more informally has developed the added layer of my middle brother finding new ways to do it wrong and get a laugh (recent examples include taping it to the middle of the painting over the fireplace and hanging it off my other brother's already-hung stocking)
    • Christmas morning stockings happen before breakfast, but not until everyone's awake so we can go through them together. Now that we're all adults it's a much more chill "just don't get into your stocking til everyone's there", but when we were little it was a strict "no setting foot downstairs til the parents are up too". We also weren't allowed to wake them (fair), so I remember a lot of trying to lure the cat upstairs so we could shove him into their room and hope he'd meow or jump on them so they'd be up but we'd be innocent
    • Breakfast itself is all over the place, but always a hot meal rather than like grabbing cereal. Some years my mom gets cinnamon rolls and acts like that happens every year but it super doesn't, sometimes waffles, pancakes, or french toast, sometimes just eggs. Usually cappuccinos too (though my parents' espresso machine is super old and barely works now, so the last couple years have been me fighting with it and giving up while someone else has fully already made regular coffee)
    • Opening presents happens after breakfast and is done in rounds where someone is "a santa" and finds a gift under the tree to bring each person. The adult version means nobody wants to be the santa because nobody wants to move, so every round starts with some kind of argument about who has to and why (sometimes involving finding a pickle ornament on the tree? for a tradition this has been weirdly on and off). Also we never all have the same number of gifts so it all devolves toward the end (in general my brothers and I, as broke millennials, will get one present each for each other and our parents, and my parents, who have boomer money, get us all a bunch of stuff - relatively equal in value, but as such the bigger a gift someone got the more quickly the present rounds stop making sense)
    • At this point between sleeping in and cooking something "after breakfast" means starting that at like 2pm, so while in theory the day is then spent lazing around and messing with our new stuff, in practice we always mean to leave for my uncle's place around 3 so it's a sudden scramble to shower etc and we realistically leave at like 4:30. My mom's three brothers all live in my hometown so each of those four households host a holiday, and barring any weird trades we never do Christmas. But yeah turkey dinner with uncles/aunts/cousins/formerly grandparents - when we were kids this included more gifts, and for a couple years we attempted a cousin secret santa, but we've settled into that being too much work. The first of my cousins is currently pregnant though, so looking forward to the "everyone buys toys for all the kids" clause reactivating
    • Also speaking of the four holiday dinners, there's also Thanksgiving and Easter, but finally.. Second Christmas. Like half of that side of the family have December birthdays (4/9 my generation, 2/4 mom's generation, both grandparents), and one of my uncles' households spends Christmas day with the other side of their family, so then they instead host a second whole thing that's half Christmas half a birthday catchall any time from Boxing Day to like a week later. This one has homemade eggnog (SO good), either turkey again or ham, two identical birthday cakes (always chocolate with smarties on top? unclear why), any residual gift giving, and often starts with some kind of overambitious outdoor winter activity which more than once has added an ER visit to the mix. It's also famously the one where as soon as the oldest idk, 2 or 3 of us in my generation were 18 it unlocked wine being served to the entire kids' table. The age range for all of us only spans 7 years but big congrats to Sarah for the amount she got to drink at 12


    ETA: my obligatory family CAH story is less dirty (as we the cousins do not get the parents involved), but one year when my brother - who was like 20 at the time! - was picking a winning card he was looking at "Joffrey Baratheon, the loathsome little shit" and "Mitt Romney [some verb idk I forget]" and went "okay well I don't know who either of these people are" which was obviously met with "how do you follow neither American politics nor Game of Thrones" and HE SAID, "which one's from which?"
    Last edited by Druid; 12-18-2021 at 04:15 PM.

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  9. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by Druid View Post
    We're pretty low-key but we do have a few!
    • Stockings on the mantle on Christmas Eve, which more informally has developed the added layer of my middle brother finding new ways to do it wrong and get a laugh (recent examples include taping it to the middle of the painting over the fireplace and hanging it off my other brother's already-hung stocking)
    • Christmas morning stockings happen before breakfast, but not until everyone's awake so we can go through them together. Now that we're all adults it's a much more chill "just don't get into your stocking til everyone's there", but when we were little it was a strict "no setting foot downstairs til the parents are up too". We also weren't allowed to wake them (fair), so I remember a lot of trying to lure the cat upstairs so we could shove him into their room and hope he'd meow or jump on them so they'd be up but we'd be innocent
    • Breakfast itself is all over the place, but always a hot meal rather than like grabbing cereal. Some years my mom gets cinnamon rolls and acts like that happens every year but it super doesn't, sometimes waffles, pancakes, or french toast, sometimes just eggs. Usually cappuccinos too (though my parents' espresso machine is super old and barely works now, so the last couple years have been me fighting with it and giving up while someone else has fully already made regular coffee)
    • Opening presents happens after breakfast and is done in rounds where someone is "a santa" and finds a gift under the tree to bring each person. The adult version means nobody wants to be the santa because nobody wants to move, so every round starts with some kind of argument about who has to and why (sometimes involving finding a pickle ornament on the tree? for a tradition this has been weirdly on and off). Also we never all have the same number of gifts so it all devolves toward the end (in general my brothers and I, as broke millennials, will get one present each for each other and our parents, and my parents, who have boomer money, get us all a bunch of stuff - relatively equal in value, but as such the bigger a gift someone got the more quickly the present rounds stop making sense)
    • At this point between sleeping in and cooking something "after breakfast" means starting that at like 2pm, so while in theory the day is then spent lazing around and messing with our new stuff, in practice we always mean to leave for my uncle's place around 3 so it's a sudden scramble to shower etc and we realistically leave at like 4:30. My mom's three brothers all live in my hometown so each of those four households host a holiday, and barring any weird trades we never do Christmas. But yeah turkey dinner with uncles/aunts/cousins/formerly grandparents - when we were kids this included more gifts, and for a couple years we attempted a cousin secret santa, but we've settled into that being too much work. The first of my cousins is currently pregnant though, so looking forward to the "everyone buys toys for all the kids" clause reactivating
    • Also speaking of the four holiday dinners, there's also Thanksgiving and Easter, but finally.. Second Christmas. Like half of that side of the family have December birthdays (4/9 my generation, 2/4 mom's generation, both grandparents), and one of my uncles' households spends Christmas day with the other side of their family, so then they instead host a second whole thing that's half Christmas half a birthday catchall any time from Boxing Day to like a week later. This one has homemade eggnog (SO good), either turkey again or ham, two identical birthday cakes (always chocolate with smarties on top? unclear why), any residual gift giving, and often starts with some kind of overambitious outdoor winter activity which more than once has added an ER visit to the mix. It's also famously the one where as soon as the oldest idk, 2 or 3 of us in my generation were 18 it unlocked wine being served to the entire kids' table. The age range for all of us only spans 7 years but big congrats to Sarah for the amount she got to drink at 12


    ETA: my obligatory family CAH story is less dirty (as we the cousins do not get the parents involved), but one year when my brother - who was like 20 at the time! - was picking a winning card he was looking at "Joffrey Baratheon, the loathsome little shit" and "Mitt Romney [some verb idk I forget]" and went "okay well I don't know who either of these people are" which was obviously met with "how do you follow neither American politics nor Game of Thrones" and HE SAID, "which one's from which?"
    LOL I love the cat story!

    My younger sibling and I were different than most kids because we actually loved sleeping and had trouble waking up, even on Christmas morning, so our parents would be up first waiting by the tree for us to get our asses downstairs to open presents. They'd eventually have to drag us out of bed!
    "when I say acab, I include tony p"

    -Proverb, 2021

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  11. #26
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    I go skating with my family, it's our tradition.

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    datalore's Avatar
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    It was so cool reading about everyone's family traditions! And the Cards Against Humanity situations made me laugh lol.

    Growing up I usually spent "Christmas" with my mom's side of the family, but really it was Christmas Eve that was the most important day -- we'd have a giant feast at midnight to celebrate!

    On the 25th we'd do gifts and the kids would play Santa and deliver the gifts to the right people. There was this one uncle who always slept in late, and another uncle who'd always go back to take a nap after breakfast, right around when uncle #1 woke up. Just a couple of years ago I learned that they did that on purpose to mess with the kids!! I had no idea lol.
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