Traditions

[RepentantSky]

I FUCKING LOVE CHRISTMAS

Our traditions
My husband and I open our gifts from each other on Christmas Eve. We also give our cat her gifts on Christmas Eve.

My family's traditions
Christmas Eve night, we go to my parents house and spend the night. Christmas morning, I always wake up stupid early, no matter what I do to try and sleep in. I've always woken up at like 5 am on Christmas since I was a kid. I just turned 31 and I still did it last year too. So that part is not so much tradition as it is my brain being crazy. In the morning after everyone wakes up, me and my parents and brothers (along with my husband and sister in law) open our gifts from each other. After that we get the house ready for lunch. My grandparents, Aunt, cousins and their kids come over and we have a traditional Christmas lunch (turkey, ham, stuffing- my great grandma's old old old delicious family recipe- sweet potatoes, and a bunch of other food).There's also tons of pies. After we eat, we go in the living room and let the kids pass out everyone's gifts (they have already opened their gifts from each other other their own homes like we did that morning. So they'll have gifts from us, we'll have gifts from them, and my grandparents have gifts from everyone.). We let the kids open their gifts first, all at the same time. It's insane and super fun to watch. After they're done, they go off with their new toys and us adults open our gifts one at a time. We have basically done some version of this since I was a baby.

My family used to do something pretty similar to this, but because of work, whether it be late work on Christmas Eve or early work on the 26th, or just general tiredness leading up to actual Christmas day, we just meet up the one day in the month when most of us can show up and have a time of it. On Christmas Day itself, we open up the gifts we gave each other one at a time in some random order for no given reason, eat a meal, maybe watch a Christmas special or two, and then everyone heads home. This year is gonna be a bit different because most years we'd meet in the morning but due to my Brother-in-Law's mother working late Christmas Eve and possibly Christmas day depending, as she is a nurse, some of my family will be appearing late. We've also invited a friend and his mother who recently had some issues I won't disclose here over, so there will be more people than normal. It should be fun though. Oh, one final thing, don't worry about waking up early or not getting regular amounts of sleep on Christmas Eve, I do that as well. So if anyone in your family makes fun of you for it or anything, just show'em this post and prove you aren't the only one who does it.