Season’s greetings, everyone! I hope you all are warm and cozy! In this blog post, I will be explaining my family’s traditions and our average Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. I hope that you can compare and enjoy. 

Christmas Eve– During Christmas Eve, we will normally spend it like any other day, doing normal stuff until around five. That is when we will grab a few gifts for our Yankee Swap (This link is not exactly how we play, but it is pretty much the same basis.) My mom always whips up some nice Irish bread, and we head over to my Great Aunt Sharon’s house. To give some context, my great grandmother moved to America from Ireland and had 15 children, two of which were stillborns and one who died in college. So we have 30+ people there, all direct family from one another at this party. Normally we, the kids, will play around in their backyard, and since they live on a lot of land, it is perfect for running around and roughhousing while the adults sit and talk inside. After we play around for an hour, it gets dark due to it being winter. So we head inside to talk, eat, and play with the dogs. Around 8 o’clock, we will start the festivities with the younger kids (10 and below) doing a Secret Santa. Then we do the Yankee Swap, and it is pretty funny because of some of the hilarious gifts that are bought. Last year, the killer gifts were: (1) A lump of Peat, (2) a tool that helps you to put on your socks and (3) our big, plush redskins pillow, which we bought and ended up bringing home! In the years prior my Uncle Skip would give us a bag full of change, and we would play some poker with the adults. I was the card shark and would clean most people out. All of my Great Uncles were master card players so looking back, I can see they let me win! But since Uncle Skip’s passing, we don’t play poker anymore during Christmas eve. After the Yankee swap, Aunt Sharon will hand out gifts, and we will head home, eagerly awaiting Santa’s arrival, unable to sleep right away. My brothers and I will normally sleep in one room together, trying our best to go to sleep but at the same time, messing with each other and getting excited about what presents we might receive. Sadly, due to Covid, we won’t be having our Christmas party this year. Due to Covid, we have missed out on a lot of family traditions, although we try to do our best to Zoom call with everyone. 

Christmas Morning– After a whole night of silently smiling and giggling to each other, around rolls Christmas morning. My brothers and I naturally wake up first and whoever wakes up first is allowed to push the other off their bed to wake them up. After we are all awake, we rush into our parent’s room and wake them up. They take their time to get ready (I personally think that they just enjoy watching us run around like headless chickens while we wait for them to get ready) and once they do, my mom will go down first and wait in the living room for our reaction when we come down. We spend about an hour opening presents and don’t get much time to play with them before my Dad’s parents come by and drop off a few gifts for us, which we immediately tear apart, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They will leave after about five minutes and after about fifteen minutes, we head to my Mom’s parents and do some present opening there. Although my Mom’s parents are there, we also meet my Aunt and her kids. Both of her kids are past college, yet one still lives there while the other has an apartment with her new husband. We were invited to the wedding with only 30 people, so it was an honor and a great wedding because the groom is awesome and really kind. One small tradition we have is to find the Christmas pickle. As gross as this may sound, it’s fun. Our grandparents have a small ceramic pickle which they hide on their Christmas tree, and the first to find it gets some sort of prize, like a battery or something bizarre like that. Another funny tradition that we have is the stocking stuffers. Everyone there has their own stocking, and they have some cool stuff, like Pez or little toys, but they are also filled with random stuff like bananas or socks, just random things that you would find around a house. It is solely for comedic purposes, and it’s really fun seeing people’s reactions to the stuff they get. Some stocking stuffers that are given every year are just passed around, and it’s fun to see who gets them each year. We spend a good amount of time at my Mom’s parent’s house before heading to my Dad’s parent’s house where we meet my uncle and have a nice dinner and open a few more presents. They live in Ashburn, so they are very close and easy to get to. So most of the gifts we open there are just for their house for us to play with whenever we are over which, pre-Covid, was a lot. After all of that excitement, we head home and go to sleep. Due to all this action during the day, the only time we have to spend with our presents is when we open them, so the next day we just chill and spend time with our presents and enjoy each other’s company.

Hope you enjoyed my holiday blog post! Final question: What is your favorite small tradition that you do during your Christmas Eve/ morning? Leave your answer in the comments and a link to your post so I can read through it all! Till Tomorrow!

                                               -Chess2Impress