He knows when you’ve been etc.

[brigid]

Now that Thanksgiving is over, the Christmas Season can officially begin.

Ugh.

Because Niko is only 3 1/2, we don’t really have any solid Christmas traditions for him yet. Everything’s still kind of up in the air. Especially since my Christmas traditions and Nesko’s Christmas traditions are so vastly different in many respects (mine involved no tree until very close to Christmas day, taking it down on the 26th, and lots of Mass; his involves very little religion and an entirely different date). We know from past experience that putting a tree up soon after Thanksgiving and leaving it up until Orthodox Christmas triggers a lot of mental distress in me. So we’ve talked about doing non-tree decorating and then putting the actual tree up later.

Our current plan involves cleaning and prepping the house but not doing any decorating until after Nesko’s Slava, which is St Nikolas, on December 19. That weekend we can decorate and put the tree up and be all CHRISTMAS! YAY! and then leave everything up until the weekend after January 7th, which is Orthodox Christmas. We will probably do Christmas Stockings and one gift (or maybe gifts with my parents) in December, but save most of the unwrapping and celebration for January. Honestly, if I can spend the 25th sitting on my ass eating Pad Thai with glass noodles and watching shitty movies, I’ll be happy. Nesko has to work, of course, so we couldn’t really do anything big if we wanted to.

Speaking of stockings and Santa, I think one family tradition we’re going to establish is that Santa only brings small things, things that will fit in a stocking. I grew up with a kind of unhealthy Christmas gift-giving situation, and I really want to keep the emphasis of Christmas off of gifts and onto stuff like family togetherness blah blah blah. Among his stocking gifts this year will be a bunch of tumbled semi-precious stones because he’s still really into rocks and pretty things. I don’t know if he’s quite up to one of those open-it-yourself geode kits, especially as he managed to destroy one geode I gave him.

How do you handle Christmas, if you celebrate it? How do you blend differing family traditions? Does Santa visit your house? How do you manage Santa gifts?

Technorati Tags: child, christmas, family, holidays, parenting, santa, toddler, traditions

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Comments

[the_rck]

Our Christmas traditions are in flux-- My nine year old figured out a couple of years ago that her parents are Santa (she found a stash of presents before Christmas and noted that, on Christmas, some were labeled as from Santa). We're still last year, we still labeled some stuff as from Santa, but I don't know if we will this year. There pretty definitely won't be milk and cookies left out for Santa.

My family's tradition on trees was to put the tree up no sooner than the weekend before Christmas and to leave it up until the 6th of January. My husband's tradition is to put it up sooner and take it down sooner. Our compromise has more to do with when we have time available to do the work. We tend to put it up relatively close to Christmas and take it down the first weekend after New Year. Our living room is small, and the tree takes up a lot of room.

I have kept one tradition from my family-- I make a Swedish rice porridge for Christmas breakfast. My mother used to make it Christmas morning, but I make it a day or two in advance (it takes at least an hour) and just reheat it on Christmas.

We spend Christmas day with Scott's family because they're relatively local. I miss my relatives around Christmas, but they've mostly all moved to other states. My brother, who lives two hours away, is the closest, and he has a standing invitation to Scott's family's Christmas, but he mostly chooses to stay home. At least we got him for Thanksgiving this year.

[sister_luck]

Christmas traditions from Germany:

We come from two fairly secular families, so religion does not play a huge role in our families - so far we've managed to avoid talking about the story of the baby Jesus, but the kid - he turned three in August - will probably find out soon in kindergarten.

St. Nikolaus here is on December 6 - and traditionally that's when stockings are filled or to be more exact: you leave your shoes/boots outside the door the evening before and the next morning there will be a (smallish) gift and tangerines and walnuts and chocolate.

Last year we had our first real Christmas tree and it was also the first time that the kid's grandparents spent Christmas with us and not the other way around. We got the tree on December 23 - it was some real last minute shopping and the plan was to keep it until after January 6, but after a certain someone pulled it down we got rid of it a little earlier.

Traditionally Christmas presents are opened on Christmas Eve and we stick to that tradition. The kid knows that people talk about the Weihnachtsmann (Santa Claus) bringing presents or the Christkind (Baby Jesus) doing the same, but we haven't really talked that up, so I'm not sure what he believes. Last year he was happy about the presents and rather uninterested in where they came from.

[al_zorra]

First: how does anyone, much less a small child destroy a geode?????? :)

At the moment part of my traditions are looking frequently at videos of our FLOTUS making Christmas at the White House. She does things pretty, warm, colorful, yet elegant, and most of all she does things affordably. You can do the things she does, with adjustments for scale, of course. And as I have no room for trees or displays in our tiny place, what she does sort of stands in. I never felt that way about anyone else doing White House Christmas, however.

As both of us are not close with our families, everything we do is just about us. The best part is that we don't do things the same every year. Some of our best Christmases were far away from the U.S.

With children it's very different though.

Whatever you do, as long as the child gets the sense this is so special you do it only once a year -- that is Good!

Love, C.

[al_zorra]

But my growing up was all about Christmas traditions, and there were so many of them, and there were the family Christmas traditions, the School Christmas traditions, the Church Christmas traditions and the community Christmas traditions. Every group and club and institution had a Christmas party -- yes, every single one of them, from the Ladies Club to the F-H Club to Walther League. That's just for starters.

Christmas was HUGE when I was growing up, out there in rural nowherelandia, a land of ice and snow by Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving through New Year's was in many ways the crown of the year, the best time of the year. And it was all organized around Christmas observations and festivities.

It's not like that now though, though still much remains.

Love, C.

[al_zorra]

But then, our nowherelandia of ice and snow was populated by the people who invented Christmas as we got to know it pretty much, including the Christmas tree and Santa Claus in whatever version, St. Nicolas, Kris Kringle, and they were as present as Santa Claus -- the Scands and the Germans and the Poles. Via the Poles in particular a bit of Orthodox crept in too. As well the Russians within our midst. :)

Love, C,

[brigid]

It was a small geode between the size of a large walnut and a small plum, thin walled, with tiny delicate crystals. I was a fool to give it to him. He threw it around and then put it in a container with some other larger rocks and it broke up. I also gave him my slab of amethyst crystals and that got cracked up, too. Again, my fault for giving something to a small child who plays with stuff roughly.

[al_zorra]

Ah!

I too played with rocks that sparkled as a child.

These days it's jewelry. Generally very cheap jewelry of which there's enormous amounts.

But when el V was in Angola he brought back for me some very nice pieces -- nice by my standards that is. By the standards of the industry they are surely junk. Otherwise they'd not have been brought back.

Love, C.

[kayote]

We are working out our traditions, and somewhat constrained by a 2 year old.

Solstice: I fast on the Solstice, Jon tries to keep L from disrupting me too bad. It's my way of resetting the stress of the season, and in many ways the start of the simple joy for me. I try to find it before that, but I need the day to stop and meditate to really take hold.

Tree:
The tree\decorations go up the weekend after Thanksgiving (in theory). This started because when we travelled for Christmas my parents came to visit us the first weekend of December and I wanted them to see the house decorated. We also used to have friends over to help decorate the tree but that has gotten awkward as families have grown, so that's faded out. Given L didn't nap today, the tree may go up next weekend. My parents no longer come the first weekend, and everyone comes to us for Christmas, so right after Thanksgiving is likely to slip. I do like it up most of December. Since we had real trees growing up (and would like to have one now) that limits how long the tree can be up. This year we'll do artificial again.

As soon as we don't have to blockade the tree we will be back to 2 trees. One in the public living room, and one in the more private den. The smaller one has my Father Christmas ornament collection on it. Also, I can't decide which room I like the tree in and I'm sad if it's not in both, so putting up two fixed a lot of issues in one swoop. Just..for now..we only have a fence to go around one, and it blocks off a corner, so the tree currently goes up in the corner of the den.

Tree comes down New Year's Day. It's nice to have a designated ending date, so it doesn't just stay up "one more day" and we're off work so we can do it.

Gifts:

Immediately after we decorate the tree Jon puts a couple Lego presents he made under the tree. A tree with no wrapped gifts under it makes me sad. So we put two fake ones under--and it works (I don't claim to understand my brain, I've just learned a few things). It also means they stay there until we take it down, so I don't get sad after. It was something easily fixed in a fun manner, and those gifts are stored in the decoration box so I guess they're a tradition now.

Santa writes in curly-que script. We don't yet leave out milk & cookies but I think it will come. Santa's gifts come Christmas Eve after everyone is asleep. (though since we celebrate more than one Christmas he somehow comes twice...) This still happens, even before L came...but it became the gifts no one really wanted credit for. :) He also brings the unwrapped gifts.

Gifts from us go under the tree as soon as we get them wrapped. My family used paper on only one gift (yes, we had a LOT of rolls), but that's only half-heartedly enforced. As long as there is no distinct consistency, it's all good. LOTS of color. LOTS of different paper. At least for anything related to my family--Jon is known to use only a few types on his folk's gifts. :)

We...are trying to get a handle on gifts. Both our families put out a lot of gifts under the tree, but we're a bit overloaded with stuff and L has more than he really needs as well. We're trying to convince grandparents to give fewer, higher quality (though they don't give junk) stuff. My problem is most of what I want are things to be done, not things to be wrapped, and it's impractical for most of the people to do what I want. So I'm just trying to convince them to just give me a couple. It's working, somewhat--though I think somewhat because of time! I do like having everyone have something they can DO after the gifts are open. A toy, and game, maybe a book. One year I realized I couldn't DO anything with my gifts, and that was a rather boring Christmas afternoon, so I try to avoid it.

Open Gifts:

We open gifts one at a time. Yeah, it takes a while, but really, we have all day. It's fun, it lets you see what people got, and celebrate with them. When Jon's folks are here it's a bit more their method--of lining it up in front of each person and they open while trying to also watch.

Stockings:
We're still working on the stockings. I can see the benefit of the stocking being what you can open before your parents get up. But...I grew up with the week before Christmas the elves came and left one thing in the stocking each night (nothing on Christmas itself), and I remember running to the stocking and bouncing there until my dad took it down (I couldn't reach). It always had nuts one night, an orange/apple one night, usually some chocolate another, a small toy, and something else that varied. I'm hoping to start that with L this year. It's unusual and I like the tradition, and was very sad when I quit getting a stocking (mostly due to not being home a week before Christmas). :)

Family:

Our hope, and it worked one year really well and has had out-of-our-hands issues since, but we kinda make it work, is to have one set of parents a few days before Christmas, Christmas and one day next to it to ourselves for a very quiet time, then the other parents come. It was very nice, and I hope as life settles down (in this case it might), we can go back to that.