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

[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.