Tuesday 4 ~ Counting Down to Christmas

 Tuesday 4

Counting Down to Christmas

(Note from our hostess Annie:)

Hello and welcome once again to Toni Taddeo's Tuesday 4 where we hope that 4 questions help you to blog, meet people and think about things in general. Sometimes the simplest questions can be a bit difficult to answer.
I do hope you are enjoying these questions...but if you can think up better themes and questions, please let me know! I want to keep this going and make it nice for you.

Let's talk about the countdown to Christmas or Chanukah or both!

1. What was the countdown to the holidays like for you as a child? Special projects at school.. at home.. with friends? Was a big deal made of the month in your family or town? What does your countdown look like now?

I am trying to think back so many years to the countdown to Christmas when I was a child...that was a LONG time ago!  Yes, there were special activities at school. We had school musical programs and a class party.  This picture below said it was a "Church Christmas Party", but I am thinking it may have been our Junior Choir, as the teacher in the middle was our music teacher from school and she also led our Jr. Choir at church for a while. I am standing to the right of her as you look at the picture.

This picture was several years earlier, when I was still "a little angel".  That was my costume for the church Christmas program that year. I was 3. I haven't been an angel since, I'm afraid. LOL.

At our home when I was growing up we usually did not put up our Christmas tree until Christmas eve, and we would help decorate it before we went to bed, but we never saw the finished product until the next morning when we woke up.  And yes, we definitely hung our stockings by the chimney with care. These weren't any fancy stockings, but just regular old socks!  I remember getting nuts, candy, and maybe an orange in the sock. I don't really remember any particular gifts in our stockings, but these socks were kind of small (at least mine was! LOL)

Decorating the outside of the house wasn't as big of a deal as it is today, but here's my sister and I posing by the front door, and there is a pine bough with a Santa Claus face in it for decoration. This was Florida, so that is why we were bare legged and only wearing sweaters!

Regarding a "countdown", I remember my sister and I had a little Advent Calendar with windows/doors that we opened each day that had some kind of picture about Christmas in it. I am sure we also had an Advent wreath at Church, but I don't remember much about it then. Later as an adult we re-introduced the Advent Wreath to our family and our churches where we served, as it had not been their tradition to have one.  You can read more about the Advent calendars and wreaths if you click on any of the Advent topics in the right sidebar on my page under "Some Special Topics".  To me, celebrating Advent is a special way to prepare our hearts for the true meaning of Christmas. It is a great way to teach our children about the real Christmas story.

2. As a kid did your family stay home on the holidays or go visiting around...what do you do now?

I think I took this picture, so I am not in it. That is my cousin Becky standing in the background, and she is wearing a "shag wig", which was popular that year. I also had one, but apparently no one took my picture wearing it. It was a big deal to me, because it was blonde, and I was a redhead, so it was fun to pretend I was a blonde for a while. LOL.  This is at my grandparents' house. We usually rotated around for Christmas dinner: one year at our house, one year at my grandparents, and one year at my Aunt Marion's house (she is on the left). We all lived within 10 miles of each other.

Oh, one more thing...in the evening when it got dark we would drive around town and look at the Christmas lights. There was one home in the town where my Grandparents lived that we always went to look at. The house had a big bay window in the front, and they always had a beautiful dancing ballerina doll in that window! She was quite large, maybe at least 4 feet tall I would guess, and it was the most beautiful sight to see! I wish someone had taken a picture of it because I would love to see it again. 

What do we do now?  Well, usually we have our gift opening time in the morning after breakfast and before dinner, depending on who's coming and how far they have to travel. Most often now it is just our own immediate family who live here in town (our kids and us) for Christmas day, and then if we are going to get together with the extended family it is usually on another day since we live about 2 hours apart and it is just too much to try to do in one day for everyone.  Sometimes we wait until New Year's and have our extended family Christmas gathering then. It just depends on everyone's schedules, which seems to be getting more complicated as the years go by.  And this year, since Christmas is on Sunday, we will go to church and then come home and have dinner and then open gifts after dinner with our immediate family.  I still don't know when we are going to meet up with the rest of the family. We are all too busy to even talk about it right now. But it will happen...and it will be great when we are together.

3. What foods did Mom and Grandma make for those days? What snacks were out? What is the food situation in your home today?

This must have been the year we had Christmas dinner at our house. I think this might have been the first or 2nd Christmas we had in that house that my daddy built. I am holding a new baby doll in my arms. Mom is holding the turkey that she must have just taken out of the oven...her pretty turquoise 1957 variety oven!  Seems like we usually had ham for Christmas and turkey for Thanksgiving, but this particular picture shows a turkey for Christmas.

My Mom always baked sugar cookies and pies. My Grandmother made her special Sand Tart cookies, which our son Scott now does for the family.  (click on that link for more information!)  It seems like my Aunt Marion always made fudge.  Of course there's always a lot of little snacks around at Christmas...candy, nuts, pretzels, cookies...way too much stuff.  My mother in law always made a fruitcake, and she and I were really the only ones who liked it. 

Today...this year we are having cornish hens for Christmas dinner. I've never had them before, but my daughter in love is going to cook them.  Sometimes we have ham, or hamloaf (my grandmother's recipe, or sometimes we have lasagna. We try to change it up from year to year to make it more interesting.


4. Did you have a traditional way of spending the day with time to open gifts, visit, special breakfasts, special dinner, guests? What do you do now?

In my home growing up our tradition was that we had to get dressed, wash our faces, brush our teeth and make our beds before we could go out to open presents. THEN, once my parents were ready, meaning my mother had her coffee, etc., we would line up in the hallway that led out from the bedrooms to the living room. There was a curtain hung across the opening so we couldn't see into the living room until Daddy removed it.  We lined up from the youngest to the oldest, me being the youngest got to go first...and we would sing Jingle Bells or some other Christmas carol and then we would "march" out into the living room and find our little stack of presents.  The picture above was me, getting my prized "Doctor's Kit" that I wanted so very much! Can you tell I was happy?

  

I don't really remember when we ate breakfast...we may have had to eat a bowl of cereal or something before we could really open gifts...I'm not sure now...but once the gifts were opened (one at a time and not all at once...people taking turns so we could see what each other received), then we would get cleaned up and dressed for Christmas dinner and help set the table or do whatever we had to do. I liked it best when we didn't have to leave home to go to Grandma's house for dinner, because then I could stay at home and still play with my new toys.  If we left to go to Grandma's we could take one new thing with us as long as it wasn't something too big, or if we got any new clothes that were suitable for dinner we could wear our new clothes. I know we dressed up for Christmas dinner, which meant a dress for the girls/ladies.

HERE is a link to a previous post written a few years ago, where you may see a few of these same pictures, but a little different narration to go along with it. I hope you will enjoy it. It just might include an original letter to Santa, with his response!

HERE is the link to the Tuesday 4 linkup. Let's go see what everyone else is writing about!

Hope you have a very Merry Christmas...

and please remember that

Jesus is the Reason for the Season!!