Christmas Traditions

I've had a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Being sick has really taken it out of me. Before Thanksgiving I was way excited for Christmas because I knew there was still plenty of time to get ready for it. Christmas is now a week away and I still haven't finished shopping and I'm not sure I actually will. Wrapping the few presents I've picked up for Nick took forever. I didn't bother to put any lables on them either so hopefully there won't be any confusion Christmas night when we open them. Putting my tree up was a week long process and I put the bare minimum on it this year. Basically just enough to say it's been done.

But all bah humbugness aside, I really do love Christmas time. I love all the traditional things about Christmas and I love creating my own traditions (although pretty much every tradition Nick and I have done up to this point in our marriage didn't get done this year). One of my favorite traditions with Nick is picking three acts of service to do this time of year. We usually keep them pretty simple since we're always so busy with work and school. Most of the time it's picking a name off an angel christmas tree, buying a gift to put in a collection box for kids, and finding someone we know is in need of something and making sure they get a secret santa gift left on their doorstep. We pick three services to do every Christmas and call it our Three Wisemen Gifts.

We make gingerbread houses with Nick's family even though there are only 2 little kids to do them with. Nick always tries to do the most elaborate house EVER! This year he drew it out on graph paper first and the front side alone took three sheets of graph paper pieced together. It came out to be something like 14"x18". It was huge! Unfortunately assembling it didn't go so well and after several set backs he finally decided to scale it down when one of the sides dropped to the floor and broke. The sad thing about it was he had put a good 7 hours into building it just to start over and put together a much simpler, less impressive house. But he still used as much creativity as he could. He put a pond on the side of the house with little ducks made out of tootsie rolls, he made a stained glass window, a snow fort, a mailbox, a christmas tree, a water well with a bucket, and an ever so impressive tractor! I helped with some of the finishing touches, but other than that he did the whole thing himself. I would have helped more, but I wasn't feeling the greatest that day so I just let him do it.

Other traditions I love...! Seeing the temple lights. I especially love going to the Mesa Temple. Not only are their lights really impressive, but inside the visitors center they set up a room with different nativities from all around the world. It's really neat to see how different countries view the nativity and how it's altered to fit their customs. I don't know how many nativities they set up, but there are TONS to look at!

When I was little we used to drive around on Christmas eve to different neighborhoods to see christmas lights. I remember getting so excited to see houses that went all out with their decorations. It would make Christmas so much more magical!

One thing I really miss about being home during the holidays is my dad's collection of Christmas music. He LOVES christmas music and I remember my mom would get SO mad if he started playing it before December first... which happened pretty much every year! I never got tired of his selections and now I really miss not having his CD's to listen to. I found an online radio station that occassionally played some of the songs (from the same artists) that he would play and that would get me in the Christmas mood; at least it helped me get my tree decorated. It just isn't the same to hear classic Christmas songs that I know from the Carpenter's or Anne Murray, be sung by new age groups that jazz them up and change them.

It was a tradition for my dad to record us kids opening presents every year. He set up the camera every Christmas Eve and supposedly left it running all night to make sure none of us got up to sneak a peek. For a long time my parents didn't put any presents under the tree until we went to bed on Christmas Eve. We would wake up super early in the morning, go upstairs and holler over and over trying to wake my parents up so we could open presents. We weren't aloud to go past the family room because we would see the Christmas tree in the living room and of course my parents room was at the other end of the house! They would slowly drag themselves out of bed and my mom would come sit with us in the family room while my dad went into the living room to make sure everything was perfect before letting us come in. I really have no idea what he was doing in there, I just remember it taking FOREVER and we would get so impatient and complain that he was taking too long! But, my dad has a video from every Christmas since he married my mom of our excited faces on Christmas morning when we finally got to see all the presents under the tree. And with 5 kids, you can imagine there were a LOT of presents!

With that, I remember one year I slept in my brother's room with him when I was like 5 or 6 which made him 16 or 17, and heard a big thump upstairs and my brother told me to hurry and fall asleep because Santa just landed on the roof. It made me so excited, but the silly thing is all the kids bedrooms were downstairs and directly above my brother's room was my parents room so I couldn't possibly have heard Santa land on the roof. But who's that logical when you're a kid who still believes in Santa?!

As we got older my parents started putting the presents out long before Christmas Eve, but there was a catch. None of the gifts had our names on them. They had fun Christmas names on them like reindeer names, frosty, and the Grinch. It was fun for us because we were aloud to snoop and try to figure out who was who and on Christmas morning we would say our guesses and see if we were right. The first year she did it was probably the hardest because there were only three of us kids living at home and at least 7 different names under the tree. We weren't expecting our parents to have silly names and the gifts to the family to be named something else so we had a hard time figuring it out.

Our stockings were always draped across the front of the couch in the living room. My dad built the house I grew up in which meant he had issues about putting holes in the walls so we never hung our stockings. Santa always put the present from him on the couch underneath our stockings. For a long time he either brought us each a baby doll or a porcelain doll.

Every year for as long as I can remember my Grandma and Grandpa Norton have given us an ornament for the Christmas tree. They're always a different christmas picture cut out with our name and the year etched on them. We always got to put them wherever we wanted on the Christmas tree and it was special knowing that ornament was all mine! I'm not sure when that tradition started, but I'm the 5th youngest grandkid so I'm pretty sure I have one from every year since I was born. And my grandma still does them for us today. The only difference is now they say Hendricks on them instead of Sara.

I think my all time most favorite tradition growing up was setting up the "Rogers' Village". It was pretty much incredible. For a long time my mom would set it up under the christmas tree. She would raise the tree up to sit on cinder blocks and then cover the blocks and floor with batting. It would stretch the full length of the room which is probably 10 feet or so. It had your traditional village scenes with houses, carolers, carriage rides, and an ice skating rink, but there were always fun things to look for. Since the cinder blocks created a hill thats where the ski slope would be complete with a ski lift and some random skier stuck in a tree! The shopping center/strip mall always had a car being towed from the parking lot. And there was usually someone trying to catch fish out of the ice skating rink. But the village wouldn't be complete without the tall, white picket fence that lit up and ran the length of of it with a gate in the middle to allow visitors to enter into the "Rogers' Village" (which was written across the top of the gate). Like I said, it was pretty much incredible and I wish I had a picture handy so you would believe me!

I think my Grandma Rogers is who got my mom started on having a Christmas village. My grandma's house was always decked out in Christmas stuff and she used to make a lot of her decorations. She made a lot of houses for her Christmas village and gave some to my mom. The first christmas after my grandma died my mom did a special city of just the houses my grandma made and dedicated it to her with a framed note talking about how much we love and missed her. That was a really special year and it brought my dad to tears when he saw it.

Every year for christmas I ask my mom to give me some of her Christmas village so I can start my own collection, but she never lets me have any. One of these years she's gonna give into me! She doesn't set it up anymore since it's just her and my dad at home and it's a lot of work, but she says she just isn't ready to part with it. I guess it's better that way since it would be hard to keep my puppy out of it right now.

Well, this post about traditions turned out to be more about what Christmas was like for me growing up. If nothing else, hopefully my family enjoyed going down memory lane with me!