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Happy Thanksgiving, Americans.
I hope it's a good day for y'all!
I'm one of those people for whom the term 'family' also means 'relatives'. I'd trust my relatives to look after me, to be there for me, to help me out of a hole - even one of my own making, and not to cheat me out of anything that's mine.
I'm not sure if that makes me 'lucky' or not. I'm not really sure it matters, except that I do have "family" - ie. people I can count on - which I firmly believe everyone should have and I know so many people don't.
Our traditions at this time of year are simply: a Christmas with the extended family (relatives and orphaned friends), plenty of food and drink and conversation and laughter, a chance to catch up with the relatives we've lost touch with in the last year.
Oh, and opening presents together on Christmas morning, before we go anywhere for lunch (which is the big meal for us). That's going to be tricky this year since stepbro 1 and his g/f are going to be in China on big travel journey over Christmas. We'll do something when they get back, but I think the stepdad will feel it on Christmas morning.
Otherwise, there's the traditions of Potato Salad (sour cream, boiled eggs, mayo), and Pavlova (there's never enough for seconds and never any leftover), Smoked Salmon, Prawns, Mum's Ohmygod Noodles, and Way Too Much Ham For Everyone To Finish. But that's just food.
There's no Putting Up Of The Tree for us (the tree's already up...my sister didn't take it down last Christmas), or carolling or, really, anything particularly specific.
My aunt on my father's side wants us to go around to her place for Christmas Eve Lunch with that side of the family, and I'm going to see if I can swing the time. We're not close the way we are with my mother's side of the family, but they're good people, even if my uncle is not exactly a thrilling conversationalist. And they're family.
I'm a little curious and I'm not sure I've ever asked this question before: what kind of traditions do you have for this time of year? Are they your own, carry-overs from your parents/family, or adopted from somewhere else? And do you enjoy this time of year, or do you look upon it with dread and loathing?
I hope it's a good day for y'all!
I'm one of those people for whom the term 'family' also means 'relatives'. I'd trust my relatives to look after me, to be there for me, to help me out of a hole - even one of my own making, and not to cheat me out of anything that's mine.
I'm not sure if that makes me 'lucky' or not. I'm not really sure it matters, except that I do have "family" - ie. people I can count on - which I firmly believe everyone should have and I know so many people don't.
Our traditions at this time of year are simply: a Christmas with the extended family (relatives and orphaned friends), plenty of food and drink and conversation and laughter, a chance to catch up with the relatives we've lost touch with in the last year.
Oh, and opening presents together on Christmas morning, before we go anywhere for lunch (which is the big meal for us). That's going to be tricky this year since stepbro 1 and his g/f are going to be in China on big travel journey over Christmas. We'll do something when they get back, but I think the stepdad will feel it on Christmas morning.
Otherwise, there's the traditions of Potato Salad (sour cream, boiled eggs, mayo), and Pavlova (there's never enough for seconds and never any leftover), Smoked Salmon, Prawns, Mum's Ohmygod Noodles, and Way Too Much Ham For Everyone To Finish. But that's just food.
There's no Putting Up Of The Tree for us (the tree's already up...my sister didn't take it down last Christmas), or carolling or, really, anything particularly specific.
My aunt on my father's side wants us to go around to her place for Christmas Eve Lunch with that side of the family, and I'm going to see if I can swing the time. We're not close the way we are with my mother's side of the family, but they're good people, even if my uncle is not exactly a thrilling conversationalist. And they're family.
I'm a little curious and I'm not sure I've ever asked this question before: what kind of traditions do you have for this time of year? Are they your own, carry-overs from your parents/family, or adopted from somewhere else? And do you enjoy this time of year, or do you look upon it with dread and loathing?
long comment is long. sorry!
Black Friday: All the women of the family (on my mother's side; we're not as close to my dad's side) get up at some extremely early hour (I think we're 3am this year) and go shopping. We shop all day until close to midnight. Many of us get the majority of our Christmas shopping done in one go. This is one of my favorite traditions b/c I like being one of a crowd and b/c it doesn't require cooking.
Cookie Day: Sometime between Tgiving and Christmas. We cook cookies of all kinds. Lots and lots. Then we divvy them up among the now four families (my eldest aunt rarely joins in, sadly) and that's about it.
Christmas Eve: BIG dinner at my maternal grandparents' house. All maternal family in attendance. HUGE potluck dinner (note: each holiday has its own set of dishes that are eaten that holiday. Christmas has ham, maybe a turkey, certain casseroles, veggies, a cheese ball, etc). Again, food is brought by the women of the family, save for my uncle who does this baked cheese thing. (One of the ways I marked my growing up over the years is bringing something for the holidays). Then we open presents from grandparents and from whoever got our name from the drawing on Tgiving.
Christmas Day: I stay over at my parents' house. Wake up and open stocking gifts on my own. Before my sister got married, we'd open morning gifts together, then head to my paternal grandparents' for Christmas brunch and presents from them (this is a huge gathering as well. My two paternal aunts and grandmother provide all the food). Then we go to my maternal grandmother's again and eat leftovers that evening. Now, though, I think my mother does Christmas morning breakfast, so I'm not entirely sure how everything goes.
New Year's Eve: We go to my aunt's house and eat a variety of finger foods. Sports play on the television until the ball drop, if anyone remembers. Best part of NYE is the board games. We play new games we got for Christmas, as well as old favorites. I love board games, so this is lots of fun.
New Year's Day: Maternal grandmother's house again. Lots of food again. This is the one time of the year my grandmother makes cabbage rolls. Every year she has to make more. There are also, of course, black eyed peas. Lunch, leftovers for dinner, and return home early-ish b/c kids of have school in the morning and some of the adults have work.
And that is my family's holiday season.
Re: long comment is long. sorry!
XEve: Maternal g.parents and drawing gift
Xmorn1: Parents and siblings
Xmorn2: Paternal grandmother
Attendants are family/relatives and significant others. My cousin is bringing a friend to Tgiving this year and there has been Talk (also b/c said friend is about five years younger than my cousin, also female, and they seem 'too close'). My mother's older sister hasn't been coming around b/c of differences in family values (aka, my mother didn't get sufficiently upset with my sister for getting pregnant). But, yeah, for the most part, like you said, family are relatives and people who I can rely upon in a pinch-- even if they make me angry sometimes and even if they don't understand my ambitions/etc at all.
Anyway, with the exception of my brother, my entire family lives within a half hour of each other. It makes staying connected really easy. It also means a very well-oiled gossip mill.
Re: long comment is long. sorry!
And that's a lot of eating in the space of a month! Although the food sounds fantastic. :)
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As for Christmas Eve itself (which is when the main Christmas celebration occurs in Sweden), we always, without a fault, celebrate it at my grandmother's place. Even after my parents divorced I've never spent a Christmas Eve with dad. I don't think either of my brothers have either. It's just so ingrained in us that Christmas = grandma's house, with all its decoration, cookie jars ready for raiding, and never-ending supplies of food.
On the drive there (it takes four hours by car) we usually listen to Christmas songs and try to hit the high notes of "Oh Holy Night" the way Tommy Körberg does. We have yet to succeed.
At Christmas Eve, we usually have Christmas lunch, which is a pretty low-key affair. We have ham and lax and pickled herring (THE Swedish holiday food) and rice porridge, but nothing fancy. I think this tradition was developed back when everyone were children, so that we'd be finished with food in time for Donald Duck's Christmas (a huge deal in Sweden ever since the political 70s when it was pretty much the only time of year where you could see glossy American cartoons on TV rather than east-European stop-motion animation). After that we usually open the presents, and then we just do our own things until 7 PM when it's time for Karl Bertil Jonsson's Christmas. I think that if we all sat down together, we could probably quote the whole thing verbatim at this point. "I've held a communist to my bosom!"
Oh, and earlier in the day, before lunch, we have mulled wine and cookies together with other relatives.
Christmas day, mom and I usually go to early mass together, but not at the same church as the one grandma (who's the only family member who can be described as religious) sings in the choir in. It's nothing wrong with her church, but the one we drive to is older and prettier. ;) We usually slaughter Christmas carols on the 30 minute drive there and back. During the day, I usually walk over to dad's place to spend some time with him and his SO, and then in the evening my grandmother hosts her traditional Christmas dinner for the whole extended family.
December 26, we go to my grandmother's brother's place for an even more extravagant Christmas dinner.
But apart from those traditions, Christmas can mostly be summed up with two words; family and food.
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It's sort of interesting: my family doesn't have many group family traditions anymore, except for the opening of presents and the Christmas Day lunch. And this year, we won't be doing the opening of presents. My mum suggested the sistren and myself hie ourselves off and up to the beach near the uncle-and-aunt's place early on Christmas morning before we head back to the house for foodies.
It's not a bad suggestion, actually, although getting the sistren out of bed early will be a real effort...
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I usually opt to go out on walks when I've had too much family time. It's a great way to get some peace and quiet (and when all the cousins are there, it's the only way).
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When my grandmother was alive we all descended on her house in southern Vermont, aunts, uncle, mom, stepfather, mother's-side sibs, brother in law, nieces, my husband and I, our four kids, and assorted strays and hangers-on. Now we descend on my mom and step-dad in New Jersey, and my aunts and uncle stay at their own homes. Not that we wouldn't love to have them there. They just don't see the drive as worth it, and I suspect (since they are childless) they prefer the quiet.
We go to my mom's because my dad, who lives a little north of us in Vermont, likes peace and quiet, and finds the chaos of my kids a little off-putting. We don't go for Christmas with my mother-in-law because she lives in Texas and that is far away, needing expensive airline tickets (we see her in the summer, which she spends in the Northeast) and because - good Aussie that you are, you will laugh! - I don't do Christmas in the south where there is never snow!
Our traditions:
Thanksgiving Day we watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, broadcast on one of the major networks from New York City. My husband's marching band raised money to fly from Houston, Texas to be in it when he was in high school. The important part for the youngsters is the arrival of Santa and his reindeer to Macy's (a department store if you haven't watched enough Christmas movies about this). We're not in general a big TV watching family, so instead of watching the whole two hours we usually watch the last half hour. Later in the afternoon as we are cooking there is an NFL football game on, which we almost always turn on, but seldom pay more than cursory attention to, except for the last five minutes if the score is close. Being football, five football minutes always seems to work out to about 45 conventional minutes. Okay, so I exaggerated. I still say it seems like that!
To stave off retail creep which likes to start the Christmas buying season earlier and earlier in the year, and to keep Christmas music, literature, and DVD's associated only with the true Christmas season, we don't allow them to be sung, read or played until after the last morsel of Thanksgiving dinner has been consumed. During Thanksgiving dinner we discuss what we are thankful for that year, and after dinner is done we often (but not always) officially open the Christmas season by singing a Christmas song, usually Joy to the World (my favorite carol, and one my husband and I can harmonize).
At some time during weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas we have to listen to Handel's Messiah, because it is a big part of my husband's Christmas tradition. The church he grew up in had a Messiah singalong each year. We generally join in too.
We always have a Christmas tree here at home, even though we will not be here on the day, because when we married my mother-in-law started us on a tradition of buying a new ornament for each year and labeling it as such. Actually, I buy two, one fragile, and one indistructible. The fragile ones are pretty, and the indistructible ones are insurance. If something special happened I try to reflect that. The year my middle daughter got into figure skating and my son started hockey, I got hockey and figure skate ornaments. We use tinsel on our tree (a custom from the few Christmasses of my youth I passed with my dad's side) but it is eco-friendly reusable twists of shiny aluminum now, rather than shiny plastic strips.
When my grandmother got into her 80's (she lived to be 97) and Christmas shopping for the mass of us got to be stressful, she declared that her gift to every person present would be Christmas dinner at a restaurant, relieving anyone of the necessity of cooking and missing the company of the rest to go do so. In small town Vermont, in practical terms, this meant that in order to find a restaurant open, we ate Chinese. Most Chinese restaurants in this part of the US are run by immigrant or first generation Chinese, and few are Christian. Christmas is an important night for their bottom line, because the competition is closed, and they can pack the place. I've heard that going out for Chinese on Christmas is a Jewish tradition in New York City. We did it because it was what was available, but now that we are doing the more traditional roast-and-veggies dinner at mom's, I find I miss it.
We hang stockings for everyone, big and small. Santa fills 'em all.
All the opening happens on Christmas morning, and the kids have to wait until the sleepy hard-to-wake uncle is there. When it was a child it was my own uncle, but now it is my brother who is the hardest to wake.
We generally come back here to Vermont a few days after Christmas, and my husband usually works New Year's Eve too in order to have gotten Christmas off, and to allow the other docs to go to parties. Neither of us were ever big on New Year's Eve, except in wanting to see the new year in together, and a decade ago, when call meant that he had to go in and see patients rather than refer them (this stopped because the regulations started to require support staff to do various tasks like taking x-rays and performing simple labs, which the doctors used to do themselves, and the cost became prohibitive) we often saw the new year in apart. We often turn on the TV around midnight to see the ball drop in Times Square (which is in our time zone) and the kids are allowed to stay up if they want to, regardless of age. We often have fizzy apple or pear juice to stand in for champagne. It's kid-safe, comes in a wine-like bottle, and neither my husband nor I would consume more than a half glass of bubbly if we bought it.
On New Year's day we try to have a rather better than usual dinner, but other than that, we have no particular traditions or favored feast.
We take down our tree by January 6th, and pack away the books, CD's, and DVD's, and at that point anyone in the family who attempts to sing a Christmas song will be shouted down with "Out of season!" But up until Epiphany, it's all legal. That's a my-husband's-side custom.
The icon is chosen to reflect the fact that this is a commentzilla, not a reflection of what you have shared!
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It's good to hear about other people's traditions, particularly as regards country and location and background.
Your thing with the ornaments is neat and a great way to remember a year! And I think it's a wise thing to buy a breakable and an indestructable! :)
Curious question: what did you end up having at the Chinese restaurants? (And, yes, Christmas/1st Jan doesn't have the same impact on Asian countries that, say, Chinese/Lunar New Year does - those shut down the cities almost entirely!)
and the kids are allowed to stay up if they want to, regardless of age
Once I hit my teen years, I was allowed to stay up to midnight on New Year's Eve, and go out to parties (where, I admit, I usually raided the bookcase).
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Ooooh, a woman after my own heart. I knew there was a reason I liked you! I met my best friend in later elementary school because she was called to the office to escort the new kid (me) to the classroom, and I took a look at the book in her hand, and being shy and desperate to say something to fill the silence, I blurted out "I'm a bookworm. Are you?" This got the conversational ball rolling like an Avalanche in the Himalayas, and by the time we hit the classroom we'd bonded over many a favorite tome. She grew up to become the editor of the New York Times "News of the Week in Review" section.
This would be a much more satisfactory reply regarding what we ate if I was more likely to remember the dishes by name instead of by appearance and taste.
My uncle (a professor of Criminal Law) had done some traveling in China when it first became possible for Americans to travel relatively freely there again, and he had studied Chinese cooking under Joyce Chen. He is an accomplished cook who has taken formal lessons in many and varied cuisines, and has traveled widely, and Joyce Chen was, in her day, the top Chinese chef in New York City. There is still a line of Asian cooking gear for sale with her branding. For the first few years he would call the restaurant ahead of time and discuss the menu and specials, make some suggestions of his own, and then we would show up at the appointed time and just feast, with no ordering, since we all opted for hot tea rather than sodas or other beverages. There was a particularly lovely very lightly battered flash-fried fish with scallions that we would get each year, and scads of veggie steamed dumplings and shrimp shu mai. There was a dish that had many snowpeas, carrots, and mushrooms with a sauce piquant with ginger and szezuan pepper, and another that had lobster, shrimp, scallops, squid, and one other seafood item (I seem to have forgotten what - maybe sea cucumber?) stir-fried on a bed of vegetables, there was a soup with rich broth and broad wheat-based noodles and a dark green leafy vegetable, and a plate of mixed vegetables, chinese cabbage, and tofu in a reddish not-quite sweet soy sauce based sauce which was delightful in part because of the abundant but hidden crunch of the cubed waterchestnuts, there was Peking duck with its attendant pancakes and hoisin sauce, there were scallion pancakes with dipping sauce, there were steamed baby bok choy, and beef with broccoli and cellophane noodles flavored with soy sauce. There was some indeterminate very crunchy white vegetable made into shreds and marinated in vinegar and then lightly sweetened that served to clear the palate. It was all washed down with pot after pot of hot tea. Afterwards there were oranges, the ubiquitous and very American fortune cookies, and an after dinner mint. Mealzilla, and very good and wide-ranging for a place as small scale as Vermont.
We are a large family (14 as a basis, and then there are orphans, strays, and boyfriends or girlfriends or in-laws that folks bring along), so we didn't eat much of any one thing, usually just a bit more than a taste, and we are a family of foodies, so if there was anything unusual on the menu that we hadn't ever heard of, or a taste combination that intrigued, we'd try it that year.
After a few years of the pre-ordered menu, everyone decided that folks were getting stressed by the necessity to get there right on time so the food would be at its best, and we just made a reservation and ordered from the menu. Each person chose a favorite dish, and there were always a few orders of old favorites that drew table-wide approbation, but the younger generation was thrilled to be able to order the lomeins and fried rices and fried pork dumplings that they so loved, and which the older generation had heretofore rejected as too pedestrian. By then I was diabetic, so we always placed an order of steamed vegetables just for me, and these were my "rice" to which I added bits of the various leaner meats, and a taste here and there of the sort of thing I could only eat in very small quantities. I saved my quality carb time for two of the steamed veggie dumplings and one shrimp shu mai.
And yeah, our family knows not to try to go out for Chinese on the Lunar New Year.
A favorite restaurant of ours in New York City's Chinatown is Joe's Shanghai, renowned for its soup dumplings, where the minced meat and mushroom filling and a cube of very rich frozen broth are enrobed in dumpling dough and then steamed until hot throughout. They had some of the most tender and wonderful squid dishes I have ever had. They also have very good pork bao and veggie bao.
My uncle once was in a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown, and noticed an item that the Chinese speakers were ordering, but that was not on the menu. He asked if he could have some too. They were reluctant to do so, explaining many times that he would "Not like! Not like!", but he was insistant, and pretty sure that it would be worth the price of admission just to satisfy his curiousity. It turned out to be "thrice cooked pork fat" and while he was not about to snarf down the entire serving, he very much enjoyed getting a taste, and said that he felt that it would have been a very delightful dish if he had been a hard working peasant who subsisted on a high-rice diet with lean meat and veggies serving as the condiments, but as an indolent Westerner, eating a fairly high fat diet normally, it was a bit much.
My favorite desserts in Chinatown are the almond cookies, and the bean paste filled pastries with thin egg-yellowed flaky pastry, stamped in red. My brother likes to go Southeast Asian and get the durian fruit popsicles. My sisters and my eldest daughter like the green tea ice cream.