A lot of our traditions are religious, which has recently caused some problems for my family, since what parts of a religious holiday do you celebrate with an atheist? A lot of them are also German, since my Dad served a Mormon mission in northern Germany back in the late sixties. For instance, on each of the four Sundays before Christmas, we bring out our wooden Advent pyramid (similar to the ones on this page: http://tinyurl.com/yksmtx) and gather around it in the evening to sing carols. As a more traditionally Mormon tradition, in the period leading up to Christmas we read the entire Nativity story as a family, beginning with the prophecies in Isaiah and moving through all four Gospels. Mom makes quite a production out of it, actually. Santa Claus has also never had much of a role in our Christmas celebrations, as Mom thought he took too much of the spotlight away from the birth of Jesus.

As for the secular traditions: If Mom had her way, she would buy and decorate a tree around the beginning of December, while Dad would prefer not to have a tree at all until Christmas Eve, when it would be set up and decorated all at once (as in certain parts of Germany). They have compromised: Mom gets her tree early, but she can only put lights on it until Christmas Eve, when we all get to (or have to, for the reluctant teenage members of the family) gather round and decorate the tree with Mom’s heirloom ornaments.

Dad is in charge of the present-opening, and (in an effort to make it more meaningful, I suppose) he goes around in a circle, letting each person open one gift while everyone else watches, and then moving on to the next person. This is fine for the big and/or exciting presents, but it gets kind of old when all the fun presents are gone and we’re down to deodorant and socks.

Since Dad is not willing to compromise on the pace of the present-opening, Mom eventually decided that we would have to start opening some presents on Christmas Eve, just so the Christmas-morning ritual wouldn’t take ten hours. As the family has grown larger and larger and the time involved has multiplied, we have started opening presents earlier and earlier, until now it takes the entire week to get through all the presents. We start with gifts from non-family, then cousins/aunts/uncles, then grandparents, then siblings, etc., etc., so on Christmas morning all we open are stockings and “Santa presents” from our parents.

Mom is a huge fan of “stocking stuffers,” and each year, as her budget has grown, these have become so numerous and elaborate that most of them don’t fit in the giant-sized stockings we have. So the night before Christmas we are all banished from the living room while she fills our stockings with goodies and small items and then arranges the rest of the “stuffers” in piles on the couches and chairs, with each person’s stocking on top. Last of all, she covers all the furniture in the living room with sheets so no one can see what they’ve gotten before it’s time.

On Christmas morning, no one is allowed out of bed until 6 am. For the children, this means we would get up periodically throughout the night and check the clock in the kitchen and then go back to bed because it was only three in the morning, then four, then five, and finally six. Since my parents usually get up around 5 am, this actually allows them to sleep in an hour on Christmas. We all get up at six, then, but no one is yet allowed in the living room. First we have to make and eat breakfast (usually waffles with fruit and whipped cream) and then clean up. The younger children occasionally brave our parents’ wrath to make forays into the forbidden territory, but they usually don’t get very far.

After the kitchen and dining room are cleaned up, we all rush into the living room to search the tree for the pickle ornament Dad has hidden somewhere in its branches. Whoever finds it gets a special little present. At last, Mom strips the sheets off the furniture and we are allowed to find our stockings. Mom has usually gone overboard on the candy, as well, and at this point she passes out the sweets and nuts she couldn’t fit in our stockings. We munch on this through the next few hours to fortify ourselves for the Christmas-morning stocking-and-Santa-present-opening marathon, as described above.

Most of my Christmas memories are somewhat negative, actually. Dad was so controlling that it kind of took any spontaneous joy we might have had out of the holiday, and it often caused open friction between him and the kids or between him and Mom. He was actually pretty controlling all the time, but we usually didn’t have to be around him 24/7 like we did for two weeks during the holidays. We ‘loved’ him, or at least I’m sure we would have said we did, but we were always glad to see him go back to work.