Our tradition is to set up our Nativity set with only the animals, then make Mary and Joseph walk to the manger, arriving on Christmas Eve. Then baby Jesus appears on Christmas. And then, until January 6th, Epiphany (traditionally when the Magi came), the wise men wander through the house until they reach our CONVERTED stable (Joseph makes it into a house).

And lately we’ve been mad that our set has one shepherd and three wise men (since the Bible says shepherds and an unspecified number of Magi). So we’ve been adding other toys to the mix.

Wow. Your Christmas tree has been through more trials and tribulations than most.

We put up our (fake, plastic-smelling, otherwise rather nice) Christmas tree on November 15th or something like that this year. *HEADDESK* I intend to ignore its presence until at least December 10th. I like my Christmases with depth instead of breadth, you see (and that made no sense).

So yeah. We don’t really do anything that exciting. Out only unique traditions are having cinnamon buns on Christmas morning, and campaigning to the Authorities Above Us every year to honour our German roots by opening presents on Christmas Eve. But it never works.

It made sense to me too. German roots, Alyosha? What fun. The only thing I do that has anything to do with my roots (Norwegian) is ask if we can have kransekake. See Wikipedia.

We don’t set up our tree until about. week before Christmas and take it down two or three weeks after. It’s. real tree. I sort of envy you people with fake trees. Sacriligious, I know. We each trade names for which sibling we have to give a gift to. We generally trade names in, like, June though. My grandparents (on my dad’s side) often come over on Christmas or Christmas Eve and we have dinner and open presents together. We also go down to my uncle’s around this time and my grandparent’s pass out presents (they give presents to their children and their spouses and their grandchildren but the rest of us don’t give presents to our cousins and aunts and uncles or neices and nephews. We usually play White Elephant but this year we will not be playing it.

Um…I think that’s probably all.

jordan said:

Alyosha, at least you get to open your gifts on Christmas… My family has a (great) tradition of waiting until January 6th (Epiphany). Usually people ask how I survive when I tell them that.

At least it gives you more time to prepare presents! Last year I was furiously crocheting on Christmas Day, trying to finish a present before we opened gifts. :roll:

So… How was your Christmas? What awesome presents did y’all get? What awesome presents did you give?

I had an absolutely delightful Christmas. I love my family! They are the most awesome family in the world. (Though some of you might debate that!) On Christmas Eve, we went to our church’s late night service, then afterwards went to see this nativity creche thing. In the car, we had so much fun singing every Christmas song we could think of. Daddy was overtired, and when he gets overtired, he gets hilariously goofy, so he was singing with us and making us all die laughing. You must remember that our family is not musical, so none of our singing sounded at all pretty, we just had fun.

I almost forgot to open my own presents on Christmas morning, I was having so fun watching everyone else open theirs. I got two beautiful sweaters, a pair of clay earrings, and seven bookmarks, not to mention assorted other things. I collect bookmarks, so I always tell my sibs to make me bookmarks for holidays.

I gave two of my brothers each a story I had written about themselves, bound into a little book, with space for them to illustrate. The younger one got a crazy adventure story, in which he rides tigers, beats up an army of wildcats, and generally ignores logic and reason. For the older boy, I gave the story a little more substance, and he generally used brains more than brawn. Ah, I had so much fun writing those stories.

Wow, that was sorta a long post, so I’ll shut up now and let someone else tell about their holiday.