Christmas Traditions
Celebrating Christmas could include food, family, friends, and gifts. Additional Family traditions could have a mandatory attendance to a Christmas Eve Service.
Our family traditions have been ongoing since the day after Thanksgiving. That was when it was ‘allowed’ to start thinking about Christmas. We could start to break out the Christmas music, movies and decorations. The stockings were hung up, with care, by Dec 6th. Small gifts, some candy and maybe a bit of fresh fruit would fill the stocking. Usually a Christmas ornament would arrive in the stocking, and it could then be hung on the tree.
For the past few years, most traditions have gone by the wayside. As a family we would still hang up the stockings on 6th, small gifts would be placed there. The Decorations of the past just don’t make their appearance. Certain things still show up. We watch many versions of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. There are the many other Christmas movies. And as my children grow up and start their own lives, they get to start their own traditions.
Families expand and contract. Traditions come and go. To share life, love, troubles and sadness are ways to bypass all traditions. In that sharing we find peace and hope.
To you and yours in this season. May you find what you need and have what is required. Merry Christmas.