Holiday Traditions - Simply Beautiful

Since I don't have any of my old Christmas photos on this computer, here is one of my beautiful baby during the holiday season last year.

Kelly's Korner wants to know about our traditions. So here's a few highlights from my childhood. Growing up, our holiday traditions were always something I thought of as very special. I love that my mom and dad were "allowed" by their separate families to create their own Christmas traditions with their children. I am not sure how my parents came to their decisions in how to swap families for Christmas, but I grew up with everything rolling pretty smooth.

Sometime, not long after Thanksgiving, my mom would put up the tree and we would sometimes help decorate it and the house. We would spend our Christmases with my parent's parents, my grandparents; and we would switch off by rotating Thanksgiving with one family and Christmas with the other. The next year, we'd switch. We were always traveling and there is one small part of me that wishes we would have spent it as just our family here and there. There were many, many years where almost every Christmas (no matter whose family we were with), we went skiing. There were so may fun memories of that!! And usually, on Christmas Eve, we could choose one present under the tree to open. Then on Christmas morning, we'd discover what Santa had brought by coming in to see all of ours gifts unwrapped. My parents always did such a great job at making it look so magical. The presentation of the gifts under the tree was literally something you'd find out of a whimsical holiday children's book. We'd then have a homemade Christmas breakfast prepared by my grandmother(s) and mom (and other women, aunts...etc) and then open all of our other presents. That's usually be followed by all of us kids staying in our pj's all day, playing with all of our Christmas loot, all the while a wonderful Christmas dinner being prepared by the ladies.

Some of my favorite childhood Christmas memories are of me coming home from school seeing the beautifully wrapped presents under the tree, and with each passing day, the amount of presents getting more and more. It really sticks out in my mind how beautiful our packages were. My mom and grandmothers really took a lot of pride in making sure our packages were appealing to the eye and looked pretty under the tree. Afterall, that is the appeal of opening them, right!? And also, as I mentioned above, how amazing the presentation of Santa's gifts always was. That is probably the number one thing I remember about Christmas growing up- how much time I could tell was put into making sure our presents, tree, and most of all, memories were simply beautiful.