When people talk about christmas they always say about everyone going home for the holidays, spending time with family, giving presents, putting up the decorations, etc... However everyone seems to have different ways of celebrating christmas due to either their own, or their families own traditions. These traditions, I think are needed though, they are what makes everyone's christmas unique and interesting, and also adds to what we look forward to during the holidays, rather then just the basic idea of christmas.
I don't think we have loads of traditions in our family when it comes to christmas, mainly just a kind of order in the way that we do things. Starting with pre-christmas setting up decorations.
We don't really have a set day for getting out the decorations and putting up the tree, usually its during a weekend about 2ish weeks before christmas. That's also the same with taking everything down, usually its a little bit after new year, when people have free time. I guess the only kind of tradition we have when it comes to the tree and decorations, is using the same ones each year. We have a fairly large tree that gets put away during the year, along with some ordinary and some special decorations that we've collected over the years.
When it comes to christmas day we tend to have an order in which we do things rather then traditions. First thing in the morning when we wake up, we usually had stockings outside our bedroom doors which we could open to keep us going until we went downstairs, and also to be able to give our parents longer to sleep before we annoyed them. Next we'd head downstairs to the lounge, and see what presents had arrived. After taking a few photos and got settled in we'd then, as much as we could open presents one after another. We'd do this till either were about half way through, or its getting to be quite late morning. At this point we'd then take a break and go get a drink and some breakfast etc, then go back after everyone's done.
Once all the presents are opened, we'd spend most of the day playing around, constructing our new things, trying stuff on, until the time comes when my mum tells us we have to start moving things upstairs, so she has room to get the christmas dinner ready.
Our christmas dinner, is pretty standard I think, it has all the normal things from dodgy crackers and party hats, to pigs in blankets, the normal kind of dinner. From that point on in the day it seems to be quite similar to other peoples. We'd either play big family games for a few hours or we'd watch particular christmas specials that are on t.v. After this we'd then tend to stay up quite lot, trying to prevent the day from ending. Inevitably though we then soon head off to bed, and christmas would be over for another year.
That's how we traditionally celebrated christmas, even though I know there are loads of little things that people do and different orders people do them in, but as I said, it just makes our own christmas's unique.
This way of celebrating christmas tends to be quite a large family way, I think of spending christmas, a few children, parents, perhaps visiting family. However as my siblings and me are now reaching that age of 'flying the nest' for a better phrase, where some of us aren't living at home full time anymore, those traditions seem to be changing. For the first year this year my older sister won't be with us on christmas day and I'm having to travel back home for christmas.
Although it's not all a bad thing, we've had many years following these traditions, and now its time to make new ones. However that doesn't mean we can't go back to the old ways once and a while.
Anyways, I am now getting more into the christmas spirit and looking forward to christmas more. People have already gone home, as they've finished university for the year already, and sheffield's now getting extra busy with people doing christmas shopping. I've also as of yesterday, begun my christmas shopping, which luckily is going okay so far, however I'm no where near finished yet.
Thinking about this time of year, has got me thinking about New Years, and changes over this year. In regards to this I've had the idea to post a few blogs over the next week or two, with lists of a few of my favourite things. This would kind of act as a form of time capsule to show at the end of 2011 what films were my favourite, or what music, or food etc...
Although these will probably be quite short blogs I'll hopefully get around to posting a quite few of them. My first one should be up within the next few days hopefully, all I have to do first is figure out, out of everything, what my favourite things are.
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