Christmas Traditions

It's Christmas Eve, 2010. Just about an hour ago I woke up, picked up my phone, and checked a couple new emails. One from my mom has me thinking about Christmas traditions, and how much they mean to me...

"Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is on." was all the email said.

I know exactly what that is, of course. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has been on the radio for decades, every Christmas Eve, broadcast live from Cambridge, England. And my family has tuned into it for almost as many Christmas Eves as it's been on.

Not like we sit around the radio with perked up ears, don't get me wrong, but it was always a part of my Christmas growing up. Always there, in the background.

Something about holidays solicits families to create and carry on traditions. And you know, I really like this about holidays. Many of my best memories in life come from the traditions we celebrate.

For the most part. There was one other Christmas Eve tradition that wasn't my favorite. Growing up, for whatever reason, my mother always made borscht for Christmas Eve dinner. Borscht is a Russian soup made from beets, and thus it's dark red like blood with a little purplish hue. I love you mom, and I'm sure your borscht was wonderful as far as borscht goes, my sister and dad never had any complaints. It does not appeal to my palate, I'm sorry to say. I am admittedly a picky eater. It's just that, to me, beets taste like dirt and minerals. So, yum, dirt soup. Every Christmas Eve. I typically went to bed on Christmas Eve with an empty stomach.



And we're not Russian. Just sayin'.

Other Christmastime traditions include listening to my parents amazing Christmas music collection for weeks each year. Justin recently called me a "music snob", and he's probably right. But I just can't tolerate that pop music Christmas crap they have on the radios. My parent's collection includes The Christmas Revels, Mediaeval Baebes, and, true to our Lutheran heritage, a little Garrison Keillor. Those are just a few of my favorite artists out of their vast collection of Christmas CDs. These days, it's not Christmastime unless I hear me a little bit o' the Revels. The best part is that this music isn't about gifts & Santa & getting things - the Revels sing songs from the old world. Songs about Christ and history. Can you see why I find it superior? Yes, Virginia, I am a snob.

When Bea & I were kids, as soon as the tree went up we'd start checking our little personal ornaments that opened when you squeezed them. A little elf was known to frequent our house and leave Hershey Kisses in our ornaments each day. This year, my mom picked up a few box ornaments for her grandchildren. Now the elf can come back for them.


When I moved out of my parent's home as an adult, I missed the cookie baking & decorating we'd do each year, so I proposed a baking party. This year was our (5th?) year of doing the annual "Women of the Clan Bake & Take", as my mom has dubbed it. My poor mother usually ends up hosting and thus is left with the mess, but it is a good time, nonetheless. These days, the grandchildren are involved, and that brings new joy to have little ones experiencing this tradition.


One year - after my parents got sick of waking up at 5am with overly excited children, opening gifts, and then making it to a church service a few hours later all dressed up - we decided to start attending the Christmas Eve candlelight service at church. It was a much more peaceful & relaxed way to attend a church service for Christmas, and now to this day I still look forward to that service after dark. Tonight in church as we sing songs like "Silent Night" I will hold Eisley close and thank God for our baby savior born centuries ago and who still is a light in the world.


Then there's the big fat guy, too. St. Nicholas, who brings toys & candy for the children. Now that we have children of our own experiencing this, a few family differences have been brought up. In my family, Santa always left our gifts unwrapped, in a well placed pile under the tree; displayed so that when we ran out on Christmas morning it was joy overload - our eyes taking it all in at once. In my husband's family, he remembers Santa delivered wrapped gifts. {He also learned something new this year, "Stockings are from Santa???" That's what happens when you're the youngest of four kids.} While I can see the benefits to both, I don't think Santa is up to wrapping Eisley's gift this year, so we'll probably continue in the tradition of sensory overload.

Which leads me to deeper understanding of my mother. I was always a little frustrated with her when I was a kid, that she would insist that we wake her up before going to see what was left under the tree for us. As a kid, I didn't get it. As a mom, I totally do. As the matriarch of the family, you spend weeks baking, composing Christmas cards, shopping, wrapping, cooking, decorating - etc. One thing that makes up for all the hard work is seeing your children's eyes light up on Christmas morning, seeing what Santa left for them. Kids, you owe your mom.

Finally, one tradition might have been started last year, when we made a little music video set to Bob Dylan's "Must Be Santa". Plans for shooting a quick video tomorrow at my parent's house is in the works... we'll see if it comes to fruition.

This is Eisley's first year of comprehending {at least a little bit} the joys of the Christmas season. And so for the first time in years, Christmas is as exciting to me as it was when I was a child. She doesn't understand the significance of the "baby Jesus" in her nativity set yet, but she can point him out when asked to. She doesn't know why suddenly this month she sees candy canes all over, but she knows they're tasty. She's not quite sure why we decided to put a big tree in the living room, but she has fun "rearranging" the ornaments.

She doesn't know what all these details {the music, the church service, the baking of cookies} are quite about yet, but someday she will know these tradition's significance. That she experiences them, each year, with the people who love her most.

"What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it." ~ Thomas Carlyle

Halloween 2010

We had a lovely Halloween this year. I am excited to share Eisley's {creative? weird?} costume with you.

This was her third Halloween. In 2008, for her first, newborn Halloween she was a pig.
Last year, Halloween 2009 she was Alice, of the Wonderland persuasion.

This year I decided to make her costume to represent her nickname: Piggy Pie.

She wore a pig hat & a pie that I made out of felt with my trusty sewing machine. Most people didn't "get" it, but we had fun telling those who asked. Plus it was fun to see her as something other than the trashy witch & cartoon characters all the other kids dress as. This was probably the last year I will get to decide for her...
I would also like to share this recipe for pumpkin seeds. We carved 4 pumpkins & ended up with 4 cups of seeds. They did not last long... {and tip: I tripled the seasoning sauce but left the amount of seeds the same, as many other reviewers advised. Yum!}
I love decorating for Halloween but feel like I didn't get enough of it done this year. We did put up lights, though!
And I still had the gall to label myself "Queen of Halloween". Via doormat, no less. Oh, the audacity!
In a completely half-hearted attempt to spread Halloween cheer while taking The Pie trick or treating, Justin & I sported... ears & a hat. Oh yes, Queen of Halloween, I am.
The Pie, on the other hand, really did exhibit Halloween cheer to the fullest extent by jumping into a pile of freshly raked leaves in full costume. {She always has to be the best at everything. It gets old, the little show-off.}
We went trick or treating around our neighborhood with The Cousins & Gramma Jan. With the Victorians & bungalows in our old Denver neighborhood, it really made for quite the picturesque trick or treat outing. {And I'll be honest here, I was totally loving having a chance to get to walk up to everyone's door and peek in their house without having the cops called on me for being a Peeping Tom. Just one more reason October 31st is one of the best days of the year...}
Strange lady who followed us the entire night, taking pictures:
Just kidding, Grandma, glad you came along :-)
As shown below, The Pie's cousin, Indy, is usually a blur of mysterious fairy dust. Sometimes you can get a clear view of her figure from the corner of your eye...
When the Piggy Pie had enough {candy in her bag, that is} we headed back to the house.
Where Pappa and Grandma were waiting {for the dinner, that is, that we had promised them for watching our house when the trick or treaters came soliciting candy. We made this, this, and drank Blue Moon's Pumpkin Ale. Yum.}
It was a lovely Halloween.

When I was your age...

{Dear Eisley & Pie #2}

I grew up hearing all about things from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Parents love to say "when *I* was a kid..."

So now I would like to share with you how different technology was during my youth. The 80s & 90s.

Here is what my first cell phone looked like. It was just a phone. There were no calculators, alarm clocks, texting, or fancy ringtones. If you were to see a side view of this baby, you'd see it's about the size of a brick. This was when I was 15. Prior to that, if you were out and about and wanted to make a call, you had to find a quarter and a payphone.

I watched TV during my early years on something just like this. Yes, ours even had a faux wood box {to match your furniture!}, turn dials, and {WHAT?!} no remote!!!
The first computer I ever used looked like this. Mind you, there was no internet quite yet. No searching Google for this or that. Instead we'd pull out the phone book to find a good plumber or the local pizza delivery.
Your Auntie Bea & I both begged for this one Christmas {and got it}, our first Nintendo Gameboys. This was how we played video games from anywhere, on a pixelated black & green screen, roughly 1.5" square.
And when people in my day wanted to listen to music "on the go", there was this handy invention - the Sony Walkman. You'd just pop your tape cassette in there, press play and - viola! - you're listening to music anywhere! If you wanted to repeat a song, all you had to do was hit the rewind button.... and hold it for 2-3 minutes. But *THEN*, my dear, was yet another great invention, one that came along when CDs overtook tape cassets: the Sony Discman! With this portable CD player, all you had to do was pop in a CD and press play. Later versions had skip protection, and that was a good thing...
And computers really got high tech when the Mac Classic rolled out. Notice the sleek mouse on this baby:
I remember how big a deal it was when we got our first caller ID! Now we could tell who was calling when the phone rang. It was utterly amazing technology.
And when someone called and we didn't have time to answer it, our handy-dandy answering machine allowed them to leave a message for us:
Mommy's first car was a 1986 Honda Civic. My arms got toned that year from the lack of power steering.
When we wanted to watch a movie, there was no pay-per-view or on-demand place to simply download it. Instead, we hopped in the car and headed here, a video rental store:
And we rented this, a VHS cassette:
And we popped it in this, our VCR:

We've come a long way, Pies 1 & 2.... a loooong way.

One Year Ago

I have yet to get Eisley's picture for Halloween 2009 so I thought I'd amuse us all with some photos from
1 year ago. Halloween 2008:

I really miss having a teenie tiny baby...