Christmas Traditions~ A Fun Article by Abby Massung

What are some traditions that your family has during the Christmas season? Do you tend to go out to see a movie in the theater together every year? Perhaps there’s a certain gift that your parents give you every year for Christmas, like pajamas or a special ornament. What are some things that you can count on your family doing every Christmas?

  One tradition my family tries to keep every year, is an advent calendar. Every day of the four weeks leading up to Christmas, my family tries to do something special together. As we all get older and get jobs it makes this more difficult, but we still try to do some things, even if we can’t do something each day.

  One of our yearly events is “Super Sundae Sunday” where we pretty much pile more toppings on top of ice cream than any human should ever eat. Another thing we do is “Triple Treat Tuesday” which is pretty self-explanatory for the most part (in case you haven’t already caught on, my family loves playing with words and eating, LOL).

  Every year we have a family tournament where the winner and the person who take last place get to open up a gift of their choice a day early. At first, we’d just all gather at one table together and play Yahtzee, passing around a couple sets of dice (you’ll have to imagine how long it would take nine people to play just one game that way. Patience is definitely a virtue). After the year that my parents bought an air-hockey table, a table tennis table, and a Foosball table, on an amazing sale, our tournament got a bit more sophisticated, including charts and competing at a variety of different “sports.” Invariably however, I’ve sadly always been in the middle –never a winner, and never the ultimate loser. 

  Yet another tradition we have is to have what we call “Mom and Pops Restaurant.” This is where my parents get up early and cook up a bunch of breakfast foods Christmas Eve morning. They’ll set the table nicely, and my brothers and sisters and I would get to “order” breakfast off special menus that our parents made just for this morning. For my brothers, it was always seemed to be a contest to see who could eat the most food.

  I have two all-time favorite traditions though. The first is where my Dad reads the Christmas story before we eat Christmas dinner. We all gather around the table before the meal, and he reads the story from the book of Luke out of our big family Bible. The second is when we buy a bunch of toys and things for Toys for Tots. We buy everything from a mp3 player and iTunes card, to dolls and other little toys. It’s fun getting to pick out things to give, and seeing the happy, grateful faces of the volunteers who receive them.

 

 What traditions does your family have, and which ones are your favorites? Which ones are you most likely to carry on with a family of your own one day? This year, why don’t you try starting a new family tradition? It could be something as small as reading a Bible passage together before dinner every Sunday in the four weeks prior to Christmas, or as big as a family cookie bake-off to see who can come up with the best unique cookies and bake them.

 Whatever you do, just make sure to have fun and not lose sight of the true reason for Christmas and its meaning!

   P.S. I would personally discourage making a tradition of going to Florida for Christmas. It’s not as warm as you might think, and you’ll very likely end up spending more time bumper-to-bumper on the highway trying to get there than you’ll spend actually visiting the state. One guess as to what my family did last year ;)

Abby came to Florida the one year it wasn't 80 degrees for Christmas~ Haylie