Christmas Time

It is amazing how fast the year has gone by and here we are, at one of the most celebrated holiday’s in the world; Christmas Time. I love this time of year, although I working in retail I do not get to enjoy like I did before retail but none the less it is still one of my favorite holiday’s. I remember when I was a kid, I knew that right after my birthday came Christmas, as I was born on Dec 7^th so it was just a matter of weeks away. I remember as a kid though, it seemed like those few weeks, were the longest few weeks in the whole year.

Christmas when I was in kid in my house started Christmas Eve when the family would go out to dinner to a nice restaurant, something that my Mother loved to do each year. When we would come back home after dinner it would be a family movie night and then off to bed us kids would go! My parents really did not play the Santa role very well though as the presents were normally under the tree days before Christmas itself, but the stocking stuffers on the other hand were never in the stockings. On Christmas morning we would wake, I was normally the first one up and I would quickly go through and wake up my little brother and we would run downstairs to and sit, not so quietly on the couch waiting for mom and dad to get up out of bed. Sure enough it didn’t take long and I would hear my dad do his morning ritual of sitting on the pot for a half hour and my mom slowly start to get out of bed and start walking down the stairs. Of course we couldn’t start opening anything until after dad got done with his business and even when he would finish he generally liked to start getting breakfast ready before we could open any gifts.

The one thing about Christmas day though was that we were not allowed to open all of our gifts on Christmas Morning, we actually had to wait most of the day, but we were allowed to open our stocking stuffers. These were normally small gifts, but gifts we as kids enjoyed. For me they were normally hot wheel cars as I loved playing with cars and then as I got older they became small electronic gifts like CD’s and video games. Once we finished opening our stocking stuffers we had to go through and help clean up and get ready for an afternoon dinner with my Grandparents who would also bring over lots of gifts for us kids. Dinner was normally around 2pm and Nana and Pop would normally arrive to our home around 1pm.

Before our Christmas feast us kids would be allowed to open gifts from Nana and Pop, gosh I can remember tearing through those gifts and remembering all the things they would get us, it was great, we were such spoiled kids then. Even the clothing that they got us was nice but as memorable the gifts were, dinner was just as memorable. Christmas dinner was by far the best dinner of the whole year in my opinion and to this day as an adult it is still one of my favorite dinners. We always had Prime Rib, mashed potatoes, green beans, squash, Yorkshire Pudding, cranberry relish, and fresh pies. Of course after dinner mom and dad would go through and get things cleaned up and us kids were allowed to go and play with the gifts from Nana and Pop. They would normally stay and watch us kids play and have conversations with mom and dad, then like clockwork, right around 6pm they would gather up their things and head off to their home.

Then came the exciting part of the whole day….it was time to open up our Christmas presents from Mom and Dad, but not without first sitting through the traditional reading of a poem that my dad liked to read to us each year, The Tale of Sam Magee. Of course for us kids it was torture to have to sit patiently as my dad would read through the poem, of course I don’t think us kids were patient at all as I remember fidgeting through the entire poem, anxiously waiting for the last sentence to roll off my dad’s tongue and as soon as it did, we would race down the stairs and clamor around the Christmas tree and start sorting through all of the presents that were under the tree. Once everyone got their gifts, we were then allowed to start opening our gifts, and my gosh the furry of tearing through the paper and unwrapping every gift it seemed as though it only took just seconds to get through all of the wrapping paper.

As an adult, much of the tradition that my parents had remains the same in my household, but with some adjustments, rather than going out to dinner on Christmas Eve I invite my parents over for dinner with the rest of the family and the family from my wife’s side for my Dad’s traditional Christmas Day dinner, the same dinner that I loved every year. My Mom doesn’t mind as that means she gets two days of Prime Rib as my Dad still prepares that meal at his house to this day. Then come Christmas morning we allow our kids to open up all of their presents and enjoy playing with them all day long while Michelle and I relax and spend the day together watching the kids play. We tried to start the same tradition that I had as a kid, but to us it seemed stressful and to tell you the truth, I do not know how my parents did that for so many years.