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christmas eve, christmas stockings, christmas traditions, christmas tree, decorating a christmas tree, grinch, hot chocolate, ornaments, popcorn and cranberry string, scrooge, traditions
We’re not getting a Christmas tree this year. It’s tempting to call ourselves Scrooges or Grinches, but I’ll refrain. We’re not misers, nor are our hearts ten sizes too small. It’s simply become a tradition that we’re not in the mood to carry out this year.
Looking back at my past blog posts concerning our annual trip to forage for a Christmas tree, I see that it’s a tradition that’s been petering out. See here, here, and here. The part of it that we’ve always enjoyed is the tramping around outside to select a tree and having hot chocolate afterward. When it comes to setting up and decorating the tree, no one is interested. In fact, last year the only decoration we managed was lighting.
Perhaps this is my fault. When I was a kid, my siblings and I were tasked with stringing popcorn and cranberries onto thread. A tedious job. The popcorn kept breaking and the cranberries were hard and slippery when poked. Often, the needle slipped and pricked my fingers. The popcorn and cranberry strings were strung on the tree like garland. The tree was officially decorated on Christmas Eve. Always. We were allowed to put on one ornament at a time, with the sibs and me taking our turns. It took FOREVER. I can’t get jazzed about putting up a Christmas tree with those memories and my lack of enthusiasm seems to have rubbed off on the kids.
This year, rather than engage in parts of a tradition we don’t enjoy, we’re going to cut those out and do the fun parts. When all the kids are home, we’ll plan for a time when we go for a walk in Nature. We may take a picture of ourselves with a tree … if we remember a camera. We’ll leave the tree right where it is and go to a restaurant for hot chocolate. (I know of two local restaurants that serve divine hot chocolate.) Then we’ll come home and chill out. And we won’t have to play the game of “Keep the Puppy Away from the Tree.” Nor will we have to water a tree or sweep up needles or get sap on our fingers. Woohoo!
In order to provide a little holiday cheer in the house, I’ve decorated two windows, one with Christmas stockings (I love Christmas stockings!), one with assorted ornaments.
- Christmas stockings in the window, December 2010.
- Christmas ornaments at the top of a window, December 2010.
In planning ahead for next Christmas, Hubby suggested we plant a few pine trees in the spring. When the holiday season rolls around next year, we can go visit the trees to monitor their growth and take pictures. Is this the start of a new tradition?
Have you kept, dropped or tweaked any of the holiday traditions you grew up with? Which ones? If you’ve tweaked any, how did you change them to fit your current wants and needs?
Sounds like an excellent idea to me, Mary – and I think the decorations you’ve got look great!
We do have a tree, but since the kids aren’t home yet it is undecorated, and has been like this for over a week now because I can’t be bothered because the decorations are in the loft where it is very cold. I’m hoping to stir myself soon.
Thankfully, our Christmas decorations are in a closet, so I don’t have to deal with the cold, but I do have to dig them out from under other stuff.
Do your kids help with decorating the tree, Clare?
Yes, they’re normally the ones that do it – I gave up a few years ago. I think I might wait until our younger one is back in a few days. Can’t wait.
I gave up shopping a few years ago. As my family and me have aged, it seems when we have been in need of “things”, we simply have gone and gotten them for ourselves. So when it comes to gift exchanges … we seem to simply exchange what I affectionately call “dust collectors”. You know … those things we didn’t really need that seem to just end up sitting on a shelf somewhere collecting dust. Well I personally hate dusting … do the fewer things there are to dust, the better. So a few years ago now, I dropped hubby and I out of the family Christmas gift exchange and told the family that instead, I was going to donate the money we would have normally spent to our local food shelf instead. I thought that would be a much better use of the money than exchanging dust collectors. They didn’t seem to understand it but accepted it anyway. How can they argue really with donating money to those less fortunate? It sure has taken away the stress of all that shopping and has left me feeling much better about the holidays.
I like how you’ve decorated Mary. It still looks festive without all the hassle. More power to you!
Joan – Your comment reminded me that we have changed the gift giving tradition among our extended family. We (all of us in the extended family) have decided to give consumable gifts to each other, consumable being anything we can use up. While that immediately calls to mind food, it could also be bath soap or yarn or anything else that gets used, as opposed to the dust collectors you mention in your comment.
I like your idea of donating to the food shelf. We’ll have to keep that in mind should we decide to change the tradition again.
Have you ever thought to get a pre-light fake tree? They don’t take long to put up and all you have to do is plug them in and put on a few ornaments. ( or no ornaments if you are going for the simplistic approach.)
Thought about it, thegracefulskinny, but not sure we want to store one all year. We used to have a fake tree that we would have to assemble, but the cats managed to find the box in the basement and pee in it. Ugh!
I have always wondered how they used to keep those garlands together without them falling apart. Not sure of when my maternal grandparents started using an artificial tree, but we have so many trees in our back 40, that we still chop one down. My sister decorates it now, using ornaments that my maternal grandparents had, up until the newest one was from Emblom Brenny’s from when my dad passed away. One thing that my mother had us do when we were children was to create ornaments from art projects that she would find for us to do together. Several were set aside to give to our teachers. So, those are still hung on the tree as well. My mother has gone gangbusters on decorating the farm, whether it’s a nativity scene facing Haven Road, a lighted star on the roof of our house, and red lighted wreaths hanging from a window that used to hang in the windows of my maternal grandma’s dining room. So, it’s really hard for my mother to give that up when children and grandchildren still come on Christmas. But, I do like how you have decorated the house though, especially with the stockings. Mom still hangs out stockings for all of us too! The one tradition that I miss the most is going to Minneapolis to see the relatives on my mother’s side of the family. Now we only get together for weddings and funerals, and the occasional family reunion, which I missed this year!
Claudette – Our favorite part of the holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, etc.) is getting together with family to talk and eat. The food is always divine and the conversation lively.
We used a double-strand of white sewing thread for the popcorn and cranberries. We would string ten pieces of popcorn, then one cranberry, then ten piece of popcorn , then one cranberry, etc. Once the cranberries were threaded, they didn’t come off.