This year is the first year that my wife and I will be sharing with our daughter Eliana. So now’s a good time as any to lay the foundation for some traditions. We already have a couple: we watch Muppet Christmas Carol and make cookies on Christmas Eve, each year we buy an official Christmas cd, and that’s about it.
What does your family do?
A thing called “Holiday Nights” with the kids sometime in December. Christmas Eve service, followed by pizza from a place down the street, and opening a few presents. Christmas Day brunch of potato pancakes, bacon and mimosas.
And my annual Yuletide Mustache that I start growing the first week of November, but that one’s just for me. And traditionally, I switch from beer to cocktails early in November too, but again, that one’s just for me.
My extended family eats Mexican food on Christmas day.
I make a new Christmas ornament each year, one for each family member and for some friends, so about 50 each year. I enjoy the challenge.
We go to an early Christmas Eve Mass, then out to dinner. when my daughter was small id make lasagna, but now we go to Texas Roadhouse or somewhere. when we are back home, we each open one present.
Presents to each other are wrapped in wrapping paper or put in gift bags we have reused for years (each one now brings back memories). When my daughter goes to bed, I wrap her Santa gifts in white tissue. My parents did that because it was cheaper and quicker than wrapping them in wrapping paper, and it made us able to tell which gifts were from Santa, and I do it for the same reason even though it’s been almost twenty years since she believed.
I have friends who just put the Santa gifts under the tree, unwrapped, but I like having her open them individually.
There’s just the three of us, my husband, our daughter, and me, so we don’t do anything that exciting.
My parents stay with us, if the weather allows. Christmas Eve we have a light but elegant supper. After everyone else goes to bed, I stuff the stockings. On Christmas morning we open presents first, then have cinnamon rolls and sausage for breakfast. The rest of the day we lay around playing with our new stuff, and have a turkey dinner sometime in the afternoon.
Christmas Eve is when we exchange family presents. Christmas Day is for stocking and Santa presents. (Less of a deal lately as both girls are in their twenties and there are no grandchildren yet.)
Specific to my family is the annual threat of showing “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” which after many years is still safely in its shrink wrap.
For most of my life, our family Xmases were almost insanely ritualized.
Tree and decorations got put up Christmas eve, lubricated by some adult bevvies for those of age.
Christmas morning, kids would wake up with a small basket of chocolates next to each of their beds. Once the adults got up, we opened stocking presents, in age order, youngest to oldest, with pets going first. Then break for breakfast (pancakes, eggs, bacon). Then main presents, again going from youngest to oldest. At some point, dogs and cats would end up with bows from the discarded wrapping attached to their collars, courtesy of my younger sister. All this usually got us, exhausted, to mid-afternoon, so there was an hour or two of naps, horsing around, etc. until dinner, which, any given year, might be turkey, roast beef or ham.
The parents and grandparents are long dead, and those who were kids are scattered to the four winds, so on the rare occasions when a few of us get together for Christmas day, it’s brekkies, stockings, then main presents in a free-for-all, with plenty of white wine to keep the throat from going dry.
My wife and I used to go to her grandmother’s sisters (What relation is that? I’m bad at those) house for a Christmas party on Christmas eve and eat lots of great food and then we would go spend some time with my parents. On Christmas morning we would go to my parents house and open gifts and then go to her Grandmother’s house and visit family and open gifts. Sometimes we would have to work a shift, but we won’t this year. My parents have divorced this year so I am not sure what the arrangement will be. I might visit my brother with my dad and wife on Christmas Eve, see my Mom on Christmas, I don’t know, not feeling too holiday-like this year.
Great-aunt?
Hey, maybe she’s just OK. 
Hey-oh!
While my grandmother was alive and the big Christmas Eve shindig was at her house, there was a little nativity set in the living room. All the other figures were put in place, except for the Baby Jesus. On Christmas Eve, with everyone watching, the youngest member of the family capable of doing so would put the Jesus figure into the manger. At some point this morphed into “the newest member of the family”, because we went for a few years without babies, and the new husband of one of my cousins wanted to do it.
Now that Grandma’s gone, the big family get-together is instead a Solstice feast, at the house of one of my aunts. This works out well, since first of all, several members of the family are New Age hippies of no particular religion, and second, it leaves time open for other plans on Christmas itself. Every year, there’s a different ethnic theme for the dishes (last year it was Mayan, in honor of the end of the world).
My mom comes from a very large family (11 siblings), and so they decided long ago that gift-giving between the siblings would be restricted to one ornament per year. One year, everyone gives to the next-younger sibling than them (wrapping around). The next, it’s the sibling two younger than you, and so on. It’s always an ornament of some sort, but beyond that it varies tremendously, anything from a tiny carving to a six-foot grapevine star. Each one ends up being something somehow special to both the giver and the recipient.
Within my own nuclear family growing up, we never put up any sort of Christmas decoration until December 16, since my sister’s birthday is the 15th, and Mom wanted to be sure that it wasn’t just getting lost in the season. Oddly, Mom and I still recognize this, but my sister, who now has her own family, doesn’t any more.
I love that plan. And yes, ornaments you get like that are special. My grandma always got us kids an ornament every year so that we wouldn’t have naked Christmas trees when we grew up and moved out, and when we got old enough that she stopped, Mom picked it up. I can still go through the ornaments and tell you pretty much when and where I got everything, even the ones I got over 30 years ago. That’s why I do it now for my nieces.
Most other things are open to change depending on work schedules (stupid sick people, thinking just because they’re in the hospital someone ought to come take care of them) and health issues, but one thing pretty much set in stone is my and DoctorJ’s at home Christmas celebration. Rather than try to wedge our celebration into the festive Bataan death march that is our wider family celebrations, we’ve appropriated the night of the 23rd. We get take-out and transfer it to real dishes and eat in the dining room by candlelight. Then we open a bottle of bubbly and open our stockings and presents and snuggle by the tree. No cooking, no cleaning, no finishing up the wrapping/baking/whatever, no phones unless he’s on call. Just a peaceful, quiet night. It’s really the best thing we’ve ever done.
Weather permitting, I go on a hike of some kind on Christmas day. The trails are pretty empty and I can usually get some real peace and quiet.
When I was a kid, Christmas breakfast was hot chocolate (made with milk) and Dunkin’ Donuts’ “original” donuts (the kind with a handle).
Alternatively, we had chocolate for breakfast. Our stockings always contained a chocolate bar. We’d open stockings first thing Christmas morning, unwrap the chocolate, then include the chocolate bars in a totally unhealthy family breakfast.
These days, cwSpouse and I don’t do Christmas ourselves, but we visit my relatives who do celebrate it. So Christmas morning, for us, inevitably involves frantically wrapping the candies that we made the night before for presentation to my cousins and other family members later that day.
Reported