Christmas Traditions of the Past and Future

I love Christmas. I love everything about it and it's not only about presents. It's about the way the season makes me feel the feeling of happiness and joy that encompasses me throughout the month of December, it's about time spent with family and friends, and I also love Christmas carols. Christmas is a great way to end the year because no matter how challenging the year had been for you, at the end of the year you get to send the year of with a feeling of love.

One of the traditions that I remember from Christmas growing up was going down to East 34th Street and Guadalupe in Austin, Texas with my dad and sister to walk around the neighborhood and look at the lights. The entire neighborhood would decorate their houses and it was quite a spectacle to see a neighborhood get together to have a community project such as that especially in this day and age where some people couldn't even tell your their neighbor's name. And this neighborhood went all out every inch of every house and lawn was decorated with Christmas lights. We would always do this in the week leading up to Christmas (some years we were even brave enough to try on Christmas Eve) and would just enjoy the glow of the lights on our family unit as we walked around this neighborhood and just enjoyed the feeling of the season. Sadly this is a tradition that I can't carry on with my own family as the neighborhood is no longer allowed to put up all the lights per city regulations.

Another tradition was how we kept adding to our Christmas ornament collection. From the time I was seven until I graduated high school my father was a manager at 7-11 convenience stores and for a couple of years during the early nineties every year they would come out with a ornament collection. Being a manager my dad was able to get hordes of this ornaments not only to add to our own Christmas tree but also for me to give out to my classmates as Christmas presents before the holidays. Everyone loved getting an ornament from me because it showed the reason for the season which is giving. Petty classroom squabbles didn't mean anything during that time it was just a way for me to give to my classmates something that would stay with their family for years to come. It also added to the eclectic collection that my family had for ornaments. While trees that are made up entirely of white lights and glass ornaments are beautiful to look it there is a certain level of sterility to them when you compare them to a tree that is made up off ornaments that children make and various ornaments collected over their years, taken from both sides of a family and placed lovingly (and sometimes in clumps) on trees by the children of the house.

Then of course that was Christmas dinner. While some people may not put so much stock in Christmas dinner because Thanksgiving was the one who has the most popularity for dinners, Christmas dinner was still wonderful for me. I loved seeing my family I loved going over there and smelling all the good food that only got made twice a year but the food I absolutely loved looking forward was Heavenly Hash which is essentially a fruit salad with dyed whipped cream. This is by far my favorite food that my family makes and I looked forward to eating it every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was wonderful to sit around eating all the food I could stomach and then of course taking the traditional holiday nap.

As I face my first year as a mother I find myself trying to plan the holidays I want to have for my son. There are traditions my husband and I share such as opening one small present on Christmas Eve and waking up early to open the presents. There are ones we hope to start for him such as traveling down to Austin's Zilker Park to visit the Trail of Lights and the Christmas Tree and going to get our picture taken with Santa Claus. But what perhaps is most exciting is the traditions that our son (and perhaps future children) will start themselves as they become more aware of the season. Maybe they will leave chips and dip for Santa as opposed to the traditional milk and cookies. Maybe they will even go that extra mile and leave something for his reindeer. Or perhaps something along the lines of making an ornament to commemorate each month through the year and placing it on the tree to remember the year we had just gone through. Whatever he may decide to incorporate into our family's holiday traditions I look forward to this Christmas, perhaps the most, as it is his first one.