Christmas traditions

In another thread, after rudely (but with the utmost goodwill) telling
Mike Morris that I wouldn't be attending a church where he taught, and
probably nto one that would accept him as a member, I wished him a
"Happy Thanksgiving?"

He responded with a hearty expression of goodwill (which goodwill I
return and extend to all of the mehsc folk), and he shared his
family's charming Christmas Eve customs.  I thought it might be
interesting to share what we do in our own families, but my response
to the other points in that e-mail had already made it overlong, so
I'm moving it to a new thread.

> Kanga:
>    Um, Happy Thanksgiving? <g>
> 

Mike:
> I hope that you have had a Happy Thanksgiving day and that
> this will the start of a wonderful holiday season.
> 
> Our main Christmas tradition is to spend Christmas
> Eve with what we hold sacred: Books and family. We'll 
> maybe make some egg-nog and begin usually mid-afternoon 
> with the prophecy verses in Isaiah, and then read the 
> Christmas story in Luke. Then we'll do Clement Moore and 
> "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", and follow this by 
> _A Child's Christmas in Wales_. And then O. Henry story,
> "The Gift of the Magi", which neither Martha and Isabelle can
> read without sobbing. And, finally, we launch into Dickens'
> _A Christmas Carol_, which takes us about three hours
> total (the women can't be permitted to read either Stave Two or 
> Stave Four). We interrupt somewheres in there for dinner, and 
> intersperse carols at the piano. And the plan is always to be done in 
> time to take Isabelle to the candlelight service at 
> church at 11pm (which I confess about does it for my quota
> of attending church services for a year). We get home
> after midnight, shuffle the kids off to bed and then Martha and
> I help Santa come between about 1 and 2 in the morning. It's 
> been wonderful having Zan and Helen both volunteer to do
> more and more of the reading each year.

I can imagine.  It sounds lovely, but my voice would be giving out
early on.  We spread our reading out over the month.  We have a basket
of favorite Christmas books.  Well, this year we have the books. 
Don't know where the basket got packed.  We pulled the books out
today, we'll read from at least one of them every night.  There are
favorite Christmas videos that we must watch throughout the month,
too.
We have a slew of Christmas tapes and C.D.'s and Miss JEmima will not
permit anybody to listen to them from sometime in January until the
day after Thanksgiving.  So today we spent the day listening to
Christmas music, putting out a few Christmas decorations, taking down
the Thanksgiving decorations, and trying to block the drafts through
the old windows- we had snow.
We have A Child's Christmas in Wales on CD, read by Dylan, and we
usually listen to that at least once, generally on Christmas day.
We are among those who do not celebrate Christmas as Christ's birth,
although I dearly love little nativity scenes, so we have more than a
few of those.  For school we work on a hymn and a folk song every
month or so, and this month the girls chose The First Noelle for their
folk song.  They now wish they hadn't, because we sing it from the
Oxford book of Christmas Carols, which has something like 70 thousand
verses.
We usually choose some presents to donate to a woman's shelter or an
Angel Tree program.  One year we did something called Magi boxes.
  But we don't do anything particularly special, Christmas wise, at
church.

I would say that we have two main traditions.  One of them is that on
Christmas Eve each member of the family will choose a Christmas Carol
for everybody to sing, and after we sing that song, the person who
chose it gets to open one Christmas present.  While we don't do Santa
(long story, we used to, but Tigger was so upset by learning the truth
that I've been too traumatized to try it again), we _do_ keep back
presents that don't go out under the tree until the children go to
bed, and we also do stockings after the children go to bed.  For
probably five years now, Miss Jemima and Tigger have been sneaking out
at some point after *we've* gone to bed,  and leaving surprise
presents for dh and me.

The other is ( read this in the same voice you would announce a visit
from Count Dracula)....

 The Tradition that Will Not Die

For years now I've been trapped by this foolish village tradition I
started 15 years ago.  I didn't know I was starting a tradition, but
children are harsh taskmasters and strict traditionalists.  I wanted a
twee little Christmas village made of porcelain and equipped with
lights, but we couldn't afford one.  We couldn't even afford a single
Christmas Cottage at the time.  So I built a few little Christmas
cabins with the Lincoln Logs, put diorama type scenes in them using
cut-outs from Christmas cards, hand-made little additions to the
scene, created snow using a variety of things (toilet paper and glue
worked remarkably well), and so forth.  I even had a little Lincoln
Log outhouse.=)

I put the first little village inside a china cabinet and put lights
around it.  It was rather charming and quite unique.  The next year, I
used the Waffle blocks to make another house for our little toy
village. Visitors to our house (and we had many) were enchanted. 
People began giving me 'store boughten' houses and other things to add
to my village.  At first I was delighted.  But now the village is a
sprawling metropolis, and it takes up an unforgivable amount of space.
 It takes me at least one very full day, where I really do nothing
except work on this village from breakfast until a very late bedtime,
to put it up, and then I'm usually still working on it for another day
or two.  I no longer enjoy it, and have told the girls that as they
leave home I'm giving them pieces of the village so they can start
their *own* tradition, and that I will gradually work my way down to
one lonely little cottage.  Meanwhile, they refuse to let me quit.  We
*must* have the village.
Until this year.  Even they concede that there really is no place to
put it.  There are advantages to losing 900 square feet of space.<g> 
We're not even sure how we're going to manage a tree.  We'll either
squeeze it in next to teh fridge in the kitchen, or we'll move a
bookcase into Tigger's cubby hole of a bedroom and put the tree where
the bookcase was.

Even after conceding that we had no space for the village this year,
they insisted that we ought to bring in one or two of the little
houses to put on window sills, and wondered if perhaps we could find
the Lincoln Logs....

I happen to know the answer to that question is no, they can't find
the Lincoln Logs. All that is missing is not lost. <weg>

Merrily, 

Kanga