How do you celebrate Christmas?

[tjscraps]

I love hearing how everyone's traditions vary, so I'm wondering - how does your family celebrate Christmas?


We flip sides of the family each year, this year it's my family, and my sister travelled from Tennessee to Alberta, Canada to be with us. They had a bit of a covid hassle at the airport for a couple hours after they landed but finally made it to my mom's at 1:30 am. Tonight we will get together and have a smorgasboard of appetizers and plan to open gifts with each other (not the ones from our immediate family, just the ones for each other ) - this is new, we usually do this Christmas day.

Tomorrow we're starting a new tradition, I am hosting my first Christmas Day! My mom and I flopped, she usually did Christmas Day and I did Christmas Eve, but I now have the bigger house and more space, so it'll be us, my mom and her hubby, my sister and her hubby and son, and my aunt, uncle and cousin. Still trying to convince my grandpa to come, but he's very very withdrawn since covid and very worried about it, being 85 years old. We will have turkey dinner and play cards and games, it should be a fun time! We will open gifts with just our little family in the morning and have breakfast as well.

 

[lovely1m]

We don't have many traditions because I work a job that works holidays. Normally my little family and I do sushi for supper on Christmas night. We also watch The Santa Clause when we open presents. Everything else is just whatever works for the day.

 

[AmieN1]

We do Christmas with my family (dad/step mom on Saturday, mom/step dad on Sunday) the weekend before christmas- so that we're always home on Christmas day. They live about 6 hours away- so it's just too far to squeeze it all in. The weekend before makes it really nice to spread it out.

Christmas Eve, we do waffles for dinner at my inlaws with hubby's extended family. The kids open their presents from them. Once we're home, they open their Christmas jammies and a new book to read.

Christmas day is usually really laid back. Because we have snow this year, we'll head out to the inlaws lake house to do some sledding! Meals are informal, easy & usually leftovers. This year my mother in law is making a yummy stew in the slow cooker- I'm bringing salad & dessert. Easy peasy!

 

[mywisecrafts]

So we might be borderline anti-social. We prefer it to be just the 4 of us and we usual travel. We didn't last year due to COVID and then we took our trip in June.... so we are all home alone... LOL. Neither my hubby or I have a real close nit family, so we make up what we want to do as we go along. This year we are getting up early to do gifts. I'm making buttermilk pancakes and bacon for breakfast and we are heading out to have dinner at a super nice Brazilian Restaurant in our area.

 

[Lidia G]

When the kids were still living at home and when I had my parents and in laws we'd usually gather for a festive Christmas Eve dinner and open gifts Christmas Eve. I would make something that was traditionally Polish because that's my ancestry and something French because, even though my husband was American, his parents were from France. For soup I would make the traditional Polish borsch with little dumplings, then French style leg of lamb with flageolet beans and other side dishes, there was always baguette, salad and a cheese plate to end the meal. For dessert a buche de Noel (Yultide log) and makowiec (poppy seed cake). Now that my parents and in laws are no longer with us and my kids are all grown up and have their own little families and in laws, it's more difficult to get everyone together for Christmas Eve. Lately it's been only my husband and I and we get together as a family sometime between Boxing Day and New Year's. This year I've had to cancel our family get together because the Omicron variant is spreading like wildfire and since my husband has a compromised auto immune system and we haven't got our booster shots yet we decided it wasn't worth taking a risk. Better to be safe than be sorry. I'm bummed out but we will have croissants for breakfast tomorrow so I'm looking forward to that and face time with my grandkids later on. We'll have them over mid January after we're boosted and we'll leave the tree up till then so they still feel like it's Christmas when they open their gifts.

 

[StacyLynn]

Usually we start Thanksgiving weekend. We decorate the inside and outside. The kids used to help more when they were little, but now with them always working, this year I mixed it up. I made all the ornaments for this years tree. And we left the usual family ones in the boxes.
We also have a big Christmas Eve Party at our house after we go to church. When the kids were little we did caroling and an Elf would visit and give all the kiddies new jammies. We eat lots of yummy food and treats. After everyone leaves we give the kids our gifts (not all gifts are from Santa)
Then Christmas morning, the kids open all the gifts from Santa. And then we go to a family member house for another big celebration, more gifts, family, food... we play a white elephant gift exchange and sing Happy Birthday to Baby Jesus.


But this year....we have covid and some other family members are just getting over covid..... so we stayed at home and one college girl stayed at her friends so she's not exposed... and one college girl worded at the hospital on christmas day so she came home late last night and we facetimed the other and did gifts. We will reschedule our party for later in January and I will leave all the Christmas stuff up till then.

 

[LeeAndra]

My mom & I (and my kids) are the only people in our family that attend church regularly (although we go to different churches) but on Christmas Eve, my whole immediate family goes to my mom's church's family service. After church, we go to my parents' house for dinner. Once we get home, we change into matching/coordinating jammies, open the sibling gifts, get Santa's cookies & milk ready, read a Christmas story or two, and go to bed. This year, we watched the Charlie Brown Christmas movie, too.

On Christmas Day, we open stockings & gifts. This year, we started a new tradition of writing down one thing we're grateful for every single day and then read them all aloud after stockings & gifts. It was really fun & special and something we'll definitely do again in the years to come. We go to my parents' mid-morning for more gifts with immediate family and then eat snicky-snacks and cookies (my mom has a whole homemade cookie buffet) while we work on making lunch.

This year was the first year that I had to share my kiddos so after we finished up at my parents' house, I dropped them off at their dad's house for the next week and my BF and I came back to the house to unload all the new gifts, clean up from the morning, relax, etc.

 

[Dalis]

It's just the 3 of us, so our tradition is to make a Spanish tortilla for breakfast and open presents, this year I wasn't feeling great to make the tortilla. Ihave all the ingredients in the pantry though.

 

[tjscraps]

Stacy and Dalis, I hope you both feel better soon!

 

[Sherri Tierney]

It was just the 4 of us. Sometimes we have my brothers and mom over. This year we did not. They didn't contact us and I am tired of always being the one to extend invitations. We just hung out at home. It was quiet but that's okay.