Traditions Ground Us

 

 We have now entered the season of the Advent of the birth of Jesus the Christ. We get the word 'advent' from the Latin 'adventus' which is an action word meaning arrival or approach. We celebrate Christmas as the arrival of our Saviour in human form onto the earth, to walk among us, to live with us and to live as us. This is God coming to experience life the way that we do, and He shows us how we ought to live by being in communion with the Holy Spirit who guides His every action and Word.

Of course, Christmas is one of the primary holidays of the Christian faith, the other being Easter. As such, we do make a big deal of it. We prepare for and celebrate it over the course of a month or so. We decorate our homes, get together with family and friends, we have parties and we give gifts to those we love. There are myriad traditions that exist around Christmas in our homes and in our churches and communities. These traditions help us to remember what Christmas is really about and also add a certain amount of reverence to the celebrations as we remember our past and our roots. I want to take this opportunity to share some of our family traditions that we observe around this time of year.

Now to start off, I will admit that my family does not necessarily celebrate things well. I have noted with some envy how some people groups really know how to celebrate things. For example, one of my kids is friends with a Filipino girl who turned 18 and we were invited to attend the 18th birthday celebration. Now that was a birthday party! I was blown away at the scope of it. I can best liken it to a wedding celebration. A large hall was rented. Special outfits were bought just for this occasion. There must have been 150 people there with a huge buffet, gifts, speeches and presentations, a choreographed dance by the young lady with her brother as well as a troupe of other young dancers performing for the guests. Seriously, the cost and effort behind this birthday party was similar to what my wife and I had for our wedding, including a paid photographer. This was apparently a traditional Filipino 18th birthday celebration.

In contrast, my own kids' 18th birthday celebrations were small affairs including a meal of their choice with friends of their choice, a handful of gifts and then they did whatever they wanted to do with their friends.

But I also consider our celebrations of Christmas and Easter, which basically centre around an extensive meal and time spent with family. In the case of Christmas in particular, there are more traditions which I will get to shortly, but the scope of our celebrations does seem held back, and I do wish that we celebrated these times better. It occurs to me that maybe our celebrations seem underwhelming partly due to the fact that because my immediate family actually spends a lot of time together, spending time together in celebration isn't that much of a change from our everyday, but I wouldn't give up the closeness that we have just to try to boost the feel of our celebrations.

But now to get into what our traditions actually are. Some of them may seem trite or silly, but many of these started when my kids were very little and my kids (and us parents) want to continue them now so that their kids (our grandkids) will get the same experiences and traditions that we have practised. That is what traditions are for anyway, right?

We typically decorate our house for Christmas at the end of November, which includes setting up a Christmas tree and setting out various decorations around the house. The tree has some decorations that our kids made in elementary school which I think my wife in particular likes to still put up. We have the specific decorations that my wife and I bought for each of our kids at their first Christmas and we have some function lights that we like to have on the tree as well as some that are on solid, so there is a fair bit of light at all times with some subdued light movement as well. And of course, there is a lighted angel that my wife and I bought when we set up our own full sized Christmas tree for the first time. Our first Christmas had a little 2' artificial tree in a little apartment, but our second Christmas we had a real tree. We had been shopping and we found a beautiful angel as the tree topper, and I still like that angel. I had to straighten out her wings a number of years ago even with her own customized box to be stored in, and I have also had to re-wire her light strand, but that is still one of my favourite decorations. And yes, I know that Scripturally angels are not female, but she's pretty and I bought her when my faith was far less refined than now.

Our house decorations include some deer shaped stocking holders that my wife found a number of years ago. The does look graceful and the stags look majestic in their poses. We don't really use the stockings much anymore, but we bought them for the kids when they were younger and they remain a significant part of our house decorations, probably in an attempt to spread the decorations around the house as we try to celebrate better. We also used to buy our kids chocolate advent calendars when they were little, but their tastes have matured past the point where that cheap chocolate is actually palatable, so we now have a unit of small boxes, 24 in all, in which we place chocolates that we buy in bulk. The boxes have chalkboard paint on the front of them and my wife writes the numbers 1-24 on them as well an initial of who gets to open that box each day, and the kids still look forward to that.

As we approach Christmas day, starting two Sundays before Christmas, we begin to watch the Tim Allen "Santa Clause" series of movies on Sunday evenings. One movie per Sunday evening, plus on Christmas Eve, instead of having supper, we have a chocolate fondue while we watch the third and final movie in the series. This again goes back to when our kids were quite little, back to when we had to help them peel the fruit or dip some of the items in the chocolate for them, but this is anticipated every year by the whole family. Of course, it is nice that my wife and I can focus on taking care of ourselves now and the kids are independent and have been for many years already. Now, we don't put any value in the myth of Santa Clause and we have no decorations of him in the house; these are just good, wholesome movies that we all enjoy to watch. Over the course of the Christmas season, we also like to watch "It's a Wonderful Life", "Scrooge" with Alistair Sim (black and white, of course) and the ever popular for us "The Muppets Christmas Carol". I think there may be few more, but they slip my mind right now.

We like to place gifts under the tree ahead of time, not all just on Christmas Eve. This is a carry over from my childhood. The gifts act as decorations on their own, but it also builds the excitement as more gifts gradually show up under the tree. Every time my kids see a new package they get down and examine it, trying to determine it's size and weight and guessing who it may be for, but there is a hard and fast rule that they are not allowed to touch the gifts under the tree. There is no lifting, shaking or turning allowed; this is a carry over from my childhood. We do label the gifts so we know whose is whose, but we use a different code every year so they don't actually know what gift goes to who. Plus, I like to place the gifts in such a way that some codes may be somewhat visible, but others are not, even if the label itself can be located. This year I was very entertained when two of my kids took straws to work together, blowing on the folded label of one gift from different directions to try to open the label and read the code. Their efforts were successful, but the code is indecipherable to them anyway. The joy on their faces when they were able to read it was worth the effort though! I also carry another tradition over from my childhood regarding the gifts under the tree. On Christmas morning there are always a few new gifts under the tree that nobody knew about, and because everybody knows this will happen, the excitement builds right up to Christmas morning.

On the morning of Christmas we like to slow things down and make sure that our focus is on the real reason that we celebrate. Starting when our kids were very young, they were not allowed to wake up Mom and Dad at the break of dawn (which comes late where we are anyway), but they could get together as they woke up on their own and quietly talk about what they were hoping for (and probably complain about how late Mom and Dad were staying in bed). They were not allowed to wake anybody up though. That rule had to change as the teen years began arriving and sleep became more important that waking early, even on Christmas Day. The reason we made them wait was firstly to decrease the importance of the gifts, but also so that Mom and Dad could make any last minute preparations before the morning traditions started.

Once we give the okay, we all gather around the tree at the same time. First, we take the time to read the story of Jesus' birth from the Bible. It used to be just me that read this year after year, but as our kids learned to read we began to take turns. After we read the story, we take time to pray about the year that has passed and the year to come and thanking God for "His indescribable gift" (2 Cor. 9:15), taking turns around the room. Once this is done, then it is time to address the presents in the room, but this is done in an orderly manner, too, which also carries over from my childhood and is something that I have always appreciated about how my parents ran Christmas morning. We decide as a family whether the kids want to give their gifts first or if my wife and I give ours first. That is the breakdown of the gift giving; whatever the kids have bought for each other or their parents and what the parents have bought for the kids and each other. I am pleased, every year so far, when my kids decide that they want to give first of the things that they have purchased or made. We are fortunate to have good gift givers in this family and we all enjoy watching others receive what we give as much as or more than receiving what others give to us.

The gifts are given out one at a time and time is taken for all of us to watch the receiver unwrap what they have been given. We all want to see what everyone is getting from everyone else and to enjoy their reactions. There is no particular order to handing out gifts except if the giver has an order that they prefer for any one person to open their gifts. Otherwise it's typically just reach under the tree, grab a gift and see who it goes to. Then when everything is opened, we take a couple of minutes and clean up the mess before we further unpack and assemble or inspect what has been given.

Lunch is usually a pretty low-key event, but supper is a bigger affair. I used to like the whole turkey dinner deal for Christmas dinner, and I still enjoy it, but we have occasionally changed things up and made a dinner of Chinese food, which has grown in popularity. 

We long ago staked out Christmas Day from our respective families for our own immediate family celebrations. As my siblings and I began getting married and there were extended families of in-laws competing for when their gatherings would take place, there was always a scramble to claim Christmas Day. I never liked this aspect of dealing with the Christmas season and I also realized that I would have a hard time initiating some traditions in my own family if we were always running off somewhere else on Christmas Day. So one year we told our families that from that point on Christmas Day was ours. There was less grumbling than you might think about that, which I was thankful for. I think that my siblings recognized that this declaration, and their claiming the same with their own extended families, would allow them to set their own traditions as well, especially as the next generation married and started their own families.

I think that it's important for families to recognize that, as the generations grow, if families want to continue to get together for Christmas, which I encourage and promote, the farther removed a family gathering gets from the youngest generations, the further away from Christmas Day the gathering must be planned. Accommodations must be made to allow the younger families to carve out their own times and traditions, and hopefully, many traditions will carry on from generation to generation.

For example, my parents and siblings used to go tobogganing on New Year's Day with pizza and eggnog (a 7-Up and ice cream variety) for lunch. This started about 40 years ago! First it was just our immediate family. Then the next year my Mom invited her sister's family to join us, and we did this together for probably well over a decade, maybe close to two decades. Then the two families started to do this separately as the group got bigger with marriages and births. Now both families still practice this and we often end up meeting at the hill on New Year's Day. Due to growing families all around, this has become the day that my siblings and I get together for our Christmas gathering, now that both of my parents are gone. This eliminates one of the gatherings around Christmas time without neglecting the importance of gathering.

That about sums up our traditions for this time of year. There are quite a few when you stop and itemize them out like this, but I would have it no other way. Traditions anchor us to the past and teach us lessons that are important to remember. My kids have always known the purpose of Christmas from the moment they could speak and understand us, and I credit some of our traditions for part of that understanding. It has never been about the gifts; it has always been about our Saviour coming to earth. The last many years the gift aspect has been very lean in our family, but it has been less of a hardship than one might think because the gifts have always been secondary anyway. I have been blessed with kids that recognize that the journey that we have been on together has been brought on by God with a purpose, so while they might have occasionally mentioned that they wished things were easier than they were, they never whined about having a lack of gifts under the tree. This has been a huge blessing for me as their father.

I want to encourage everyone to carve out your own traditions for your family, even if it is a family of one. Let's never let the hustle and bustle of the coming season of celebration take our eyes off of the true reason for the season. Throughout history, God has acted in different ways to be with His children as evidenced throughout the Scriptures, and the ultimate act was when He sent His own Son to live with us and to ultimately give His life for us, paving the way for the Holy Spirit to indwell us on a permanent basis so that we can have God with us at all times in a way that is far more intimate than any of the Old Testament prophets could even understand.

Please feel free to share your own traditions with me in the comments section below.