With the holidays here and people from all over as part of our TR family I thought it would be fun to share our holiday traditions. What is your tradition?

My family celebrates Christmas. We always go to church Christmas Eve no matter where we are. If we are up in OH we go visiting various family members after church and end up back to my parents-in-law's house with all of my hubby's family where we exchange presents. Everyone buys for all the kids high school age an younger and everyone else except his parents are in the gift exchange. When all of our kids were younger this took HOURS! Now there are only 3 "kids" so if we are lucky everyone gets to bed by 2 AM.

If we are home the NC part of the family comes to our house Christmas Eve. Some of you know that our family has hosted high school exchage students from around the world. One tradition we have adopted from our Mexican son is luminarios on Christmas Eve. This year we are home but, due to the drought, we are not allowed to have them.:( Our European children have introduced us to St. Nicholas Day on 12/6 where the children put their shoes out and receive gifts. The 12 Days of Christmas start on Christmas and go to Three Kings Day on January 6th. So we always leave our tree up until then.

Growing up in NE Ohio for New Years Day we eat sauerkraut and pork. Our Chinese son introduced us to the traditions of Chinese New Year which is celebrated Feb 18 this year. Like Americans they have good luck traditions one of which is eating candy to ensure a sweet year.

We don't really have too much in the way of tradition. We're not a religious family, so we don't do much Christmas eve until my wife's extended family comes over for dinner after they go to church. My wife's mom passed away a few years ago, and her dad has been out of the picture since she was 9, so her grandmother, aunt, uncle and a boatload of cousins is all she has left. We all buy presents for the kids, and draw names out of a hat to see which adult each of us buys for. Late Christmas eve, my wife make cookies with the kids to leave out for Santa. Christmas morning, we open presents with the kids, and go see my dad and step-mom in the afternoon.

Besides that, the only real tradition we have is taking the kids to the mall in November and have each of them pick a child from the Angel Tree to buy presents for. It's very important to us to teach them to appreciate how lucky they are, and to help those who are less fortunate.

you know Pearson, somethimes i think we are long lost brothers or something !! we do the same thing, but with only one kid (we still get a couple from the angel tree though).

so i guess that we do the same thing as Pearson and his family. guess i am gonna have to come up with a bit a new tradition for us. lol

Although I was raised a strict Catholic (church every sunday where I was an altar boy), my wife and I dont do the religion thing anymore. Christmas for us is a hassle spread all over town. Heres the timeline...

Christmas eve - dinner and gifts @ my mother-in-laws,
Christmas morning
8:00 AM -go to my parents to open gifts with my siblings and have breakfast.
10:00AM- go to my wifes sisters place to open gifts with that side of family and have lunch.
1:00 PM- return with wife to my parents so she can open gifts and then have lunch again
3:00 PM - bring all the gifts we got home and try to figure what to do with it all.
4:00 PM -take nap

I realized this year that I get no enjoyment from this time of year any more so next year we are going to treat this holiday different. Since my wife and I dont have any children yet, the "magic of Christmas" is kind of lost. I would much rather spend the money on we would spend normally on someone who really needs it. I have lived the good life and I have always gotten practically everything I've ever wanted. I would much rather see a person who has not been as fortunate get something they want for once.

so i guess that we do the same thing as Pearson and his family. guess i am gonna have to come up with a bit a new tradition for us. lol

I think your new tradition should be to send a handful of frags to Virginia every year :tongue2:

poppin_fresh, if it weren't for our kids, I would feel the same. My wife and I haven't even gotten each other anything the past several years (except a couple of years ago when she bought me a pickup truck while we were renovating our house). That's how we decide how much to spend on our adopted "Angels", whatever we would have spent on each other typically.

marooned back on a deserted island some years back, God & myself completely ate all the animal populations to extinction within a few months. I made the passing comment of why with all his cosmic revelance he cant just create more so we dont starve to death, & he took offense this & threatened to turn me into a volleyball instead. http://www.alexander-oberg.de/smileys/god.gif So i ate him with a clear Conscious & for a dual purpose.

Abracadabra- Now every time a fart a new universe is born. muhahahaha

Just some Scottish home cooking, watch the kids open presents that could pull a small country out of debt & drink a few coldies for me!

That's a beautiful, heart warming story!

:eek: was that for me? lol ive got my riot gear on just in case...:rotfl:

Ancient family Christmas tradition:

Be merry and get fat.

Well now, all those traditions sound great. Each his own. I am a Southern Baptist, oh yeah, and I dance, bump and grind. :tongue2: Our entire neighborhood has a tradition of each family lining the street beside their yard with white paper bags with candles in it. It is awesome to see! Looks like a mini airport runway. :up: Then about 7pm we have the parade of decorated golf carts with throwing out candy and stopping and serving out cups of hot cocoa. It is a hoot. I just love this neighborhood! :up:

Ancient family Christmas tradition:

Be merry and get fat.

thats why your not just caued walrus......but tell me old friend, how does this differ from any other day :D

With the holidays here and people from all over as part of our TR family I thought it would be fun to share our holiday traditions. What is your tradition?

I was raised Catholic, but never have pursued religion with even remote fervor. My wife is Jewish, which meant (before we had kids) that on Christmas we would go to a Laker game or to the Cinema and invariably find an open pizza joint (along with the other Jewish folk here in L.A.) for lunch.

As the Jewish tradition flows down through the mother, we are raising our kids to be reformed-reformed Jews (my term :)). For the holidays this means the kids rake up because there are 8 crazy nights and the flip-side presents from my folks. Trust me, our house now looks like a toy bomb went off.

I have not been to my parents house for Christmas is over ten years, but I call my family every Christmas to wish them the best and to see how they liked the presents we sent. My mom is still trying to figure out how and which holiday we celebrate more. The truth is that my wife celebrates both holidays (in the spirit of giving and togetherness) with more emphasis than I do.

With that said, Happy Holidays & New Year Everyone!

Who was it that got a torch for Hanukkah? I thought that it was a particularly appropriate choice.

That was me!

Funny I didn't make the connection. Festival of lights / Torch coral. Nice one Carmie :)

(BTW this year for the holidays, we had latkas & jelly donuts for hannukah a few weeks back. Kids got presents ... we had to encourage a great deal of restraint amongst the grandparents, last year they went nuts!. On X-mas day, we went to a chinese buffet.)

mmmmm...Chinese buffet....

how was the pork fried....never mind! More for me :D

I love in the A Christmas Story movie where they go to the Chinese restaurant and chop the head off the roasted duck!

That's my most favorite Christmas movie in the world CarieJo! I love "The Christmas Story!" It's a hoot. The narrator makes the movie a major success. :D I watched that movie 2 times back to back on Christmas day while waiting on all the kids to come over!

Yeah, it is my favorite too! It is one of the few movies that I know lines by heart.

On Christmas Eve, we get together as an immediate family (3 kids, son-in-law & wife) and usually just go out to a movie or just watch a Christmas movie at home. Then, about 9:30pm we pack up, ride to the Cathedral in ATL, and get a great seat. The choir & pipe organ starts caroling & chanting at 11pm. The archbishop presides over the mass, so it's pretty special. It helps bring the original meaning of Christmas back to us. After mass, we usually go over my mother-in-laws house for breakfast & gift exchange. When we finally arrive home at 2am, since it's Christmas, we open gifts! I usually start preparing the prime rib for the 20 or so guests coming over the next day!
Christmas at papa's house! At 9am, I throw the rib eyes in the oven, go back to sleep until 10am! Then,we prepare the rest of the food & drink, and by 2 or 3pm, we have about 20 or more of our closest friends family & of course, our grandkids! Since I'm there favorite person arrive, it's pretty much playtime until late that evening! Oh yeah, we get to watch the family video that I made over the past 12 months! Short but sweet!

That's about it!

talk about wayward traditions, spending money fruitlessly on projects other that tanks- building cars & making them perform - full street trim, tonight i ran 265km/h from a N/A 5lt engine.http://www.alexander-oberg.de/smileys/Haeh.gif 100% ozzie only components running standard 98 octane. Quite a thrill having an 100% ozzie car, now days we have your older series chev's under most hoods:madmad: