Christmas Traditions.

[ceptimus]

One thing we do in the UK at the Christmas dinner table - something I don't think is done in America - is to take turns in reading out jokes that aren't funny.

We pull crackers - everybody has at least one, and you select someone else at the table to pull it with. It's a bit like a tug of war until the cracker breaks open with a loud crack (there is a sort of percussion cap thing inside) to disgorge its contents on the table.

http://www.pubshop.co.uk/catalog/images/CR1%2010%20inch%20Christmas%20Cracker.jpg

Inside the cracker, there is (at least):

A party hat - usually made of cheap crepe paper
A cheap gift - perhaps a plastic spider, or a keyring or similar
A small slip of paper with a 'joke'


You can get more expensive crackers with better hats and gifts, but the really important item is the 'joke'. These are uniformly bad, even in the expensive crackers.

The 'joke' is usually in the form of a question and answer. You have to read out your question, let a few people make guesses and then read out the answer - usually to a chorus of groans.

For example:

Q. Why was Santa's little helper feeling depressed?
A. He had low elf-esteem.

Q. What kind of tie would pig wear?
A. A pigsty.

So, what crazy customs to you indulge in where you live?

[One for Sorrow]

My Canadian half of the family always had those crackers, too, along with Kinder eggs (hollow chocolate eggs with cheap plastic toys inside). My dad complains that he'd always get a Smurf inside of his.

I'd love to bring both those traditions here, but I've never managed to find those crackers here in the U.S. and have only found Kinder eggs at outrageously expensive specialty stores.

[Watser?]

Kinder eggs are German Kinder Surprise - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_Surprise). They sell them here too.

ETA: Hmm, turns out they are Italian. The name Kinder is German, so I always assumed they were German. Plus I saw them on German tv first. Also it says in the Wiki that they are sold everywhere except the US.

We never had any presents at Christmas, we had those at Sinterklaas. Christmas was strictly a religious thing. And lots of foods of course.

[Lauri D]

I'm pretty sure my family's only bizzare tradition (which I no longer indulge in) is going to a Christmas Eve "candlelight" church service. The rest is the usual eating, opening presents, playing-piano-singing-carols normalcy. Although we did always open our gifts as a whole family on Christmas Eve and then as separate families on Christmas morning, is that normal? :chin:

[Watser?]

Oh yeah, we always used to go to Midnight Mass too, which used to be actually at Midnight. I think it is now earlier in the evening.

[slimshady2357]

We did the crackers in Canada too, but not the kinder eggs, but they are readily available in Canada.

The strangest tradition my family does would have to be on my mum's side of the family. They all get together on Christmas about noon for a big meal and lots of card playing, that's not the weird thing. The weird thing is that every year about 5-6 people (of the 20 or so there) have to put on the Christmas Concert. This consists of the 5-6 people doing something strange like acting out the song "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" as a play. Or doing some strange song and dance number to a Christmas song. Or making up terrible jokes/plays/acts/etc... about anything they can...

The job of putting on the concert rotates and it will be 'your' turn about once every 4 years.

The strangest thing of all is that, as far as I can tell, every single person hates doing it, but relishes laughing their asses off at the poor suckers whose turn it is that year. So you would think it would die out, but it doesn't, it keeps on going.

[maddog]

One thing we do in the UK at the Christmas dinner table - something I don't think is done in America - is to take turns in reading out jokes that aren't funny.

We pull crackers - everybody has at least one, and you select someone else at the table to pull it with. It's a bit like a tug of war until the cracker breaks open with a loud crack (there is a sort of percussion cap thing inside) to disgorge its contents on the table.

http://www.pubshop.co.uk/catalog/images/CR1%2010%20inch%20Christmas%20Cracker.jpg

Inside the cracker, there is (at least):

A party hat - usually made of cheap crepe paper
A cheap gift - perhaps a plastic spider, or a keyring or similar
A small slip of paper with a 'joke'


You can get more expensive crackers with better hats and gifts, but the really important item is the 'joke'. These are uniformly bad, even in the expensive crackers.

The 'joke' is usually in the form of a question and answer. You have to read out your question, let a few people make guesses and then read out the answer - usually to a chorus of groans.

For example:

Q. Why was Santa's little helper feeling depressed?
A. He had low elf-esteem.

Q. What kind of tie would pig wear?
A. A pigsty.

So, what crazy customs to you indulge in where you live?

What do you mean, those aren't funny?

* maddog has a twisted sense of humor

#2291

[Miisa]

X-mas of the Royal Family

[Qingdai]

We have the Christmas stocking for kids, usually opened in the morning.
Then the obligatory gift opening.

We tried to go to Dim Sum last Christmas, but every other Chinese person in town tried the same thing.

[Ensign Steve]

We get our crackers at Cost Plus World Market, and we found Kinder Eire at the 76 gas station near my mom's place. Weird.

We always had Italian food on Christmas Eve, and we would open one present, which was always a set of pajamas to wear that night. Then in the morning we'd eat cinnamon rolls and open the rest of the presents and take lots of goofy pictures in our new pajamas.

[Demimonde]

We do the candlelight service thing with Mr. Monde's family. Typically we have a late supper with them and open presents at Grandma's on Christmas eve. Christmas morning Mr. Monde and I open our presents together and have a big breakfast. That afternoon we get together with our friends and have an early Christmas dinner with them. As Paul, who is Fred to Mr. Monde's Ricky, is a Yorkie we do have crackers. And pudding. :drool:

I remember Kindereggs from when I went to Germany years ago. They were delish and the toys inside were some of the most cunning little contraptions. We killed a lot of time on the bus with those things. The picture of the egg doesn't look familiar to me, the ones we had were yellow, but had masculine/feminine bits on either end so they could be locked together. Near the end of the trip all us kids connected the hundreds we had gathered together so that they ran the length of the bus. I hadn't thought of those in years.

My family was non-religious and even the food was different year to year. There were a few constants. As kids we would write letters to Santa and leave them with the cookies and milk, he would always write back "Demi has been a very good girl this year" but would always have the postscript "She does need to work harder at cleaning her room - It's a mess!"

Stockings in our family were literally huge. As an itty bitty girl, my mom made us stockings that were waist high to our midget selves and as wide as our waist. She entered them in the crafts contest at the State Fair and won blue ribbons for them. We weren't allowed to open presents until after breakfast - but we could get our stockings. So that is where the first sprint was on Christmas mornings. They would be crammed with tiny toys and candy and fun girlie stuff for me. Bromonde always got a brick of Blackcat firecrackers which he would spend the afternoon trying to steal and blow up my toys. We would always have to have an apple to represent health and soap for cleanliness in our stockings. I try to keep up that tradition. I made Mr. Monde a Mega stocking, and the pups open theirs too first thing.

The major Monde tradition though was the EGG NOG. The first batch would be made in the afternoon Christmas Eve and the blender would start up after breakfast the next morning for red eyed adults. In between that blender had very little peace. It's a very non traditional recipe, but soooooooo good. We would get cartons of the prepared eggnog from a local Texas dairy store known as Braums. To that we would add scoops of vanilla ice cream, liberal amounts of bourbon or brandy, maybe both if the maker was really gone and forgot they already put it in, slap on the lid and blend away. It is like the most decadent alchy milkshake you have ever had. Finish off with a little nutmeg, and get lit. This is another tradition I will keep until I die.

The holiday of my childhood memories is depicted fairly accurately by the following musical representation:

Merry Christmas from the Family

[Ymir's blood]

Every year I try to destroy Christmas, and every year am foiled by precocious children and the most unlikely of coincidences. However, this year my plan is sure to succeed! :muahaha:

[LadyShea]

I have started seeing crackers more and more here in the US, and Target stocked them last year. I dunno that we have a nationwide tradition that isn't shared by some, or many, other countries...but individual families have their own stuff.

My husbands family (and other Germans from Russia (http://grosvenorsquare.blogspot.com/2008/12/butterball-soup.html) as I have since found out) eat bread and butter balls in chicken noodle soup. It's totally disgusting.

My husband thought I was just being lazy when I made a loaf of pumpkin bread and said we eat bread for breakfast Christmas morning...so he got up early to make cinnamon rolls, only to see every member of my family walk in with a loaf or two of cranberry, zucchini, and (my brother's contribution) beer bread.

[biochemgirl]

My grandma gets us a Hallmark ornament each year. We also go to the Amana Colonies (http://www.amanacolonies.com/) each year right before Christmas to get some wine and chocolate and to look at all the Christmas decorations.

Malloch's family makes sugar cookies on Christmas eve which is a tradition I think we are going to carry on with our little ninja.

[Chris Porter]

Nothing fancy on Christmas eve, we stopped going to midnight rites early on. On Christmas day: Open stockings first: candy, fruit, little toys. Must have a wind up toy for dad's stocking. Sometimes a ring or fancy jewelry in mom's stocking. Then presents, then holiday breakfast, most usually with this dense, slightly sweet yeast bread (the only "set" tradition that I can recall):

What mom and her mom baked for holidays


Origin: Family recipe

Yield: 12 slices per loaf

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cooking Time: 25 minutes

Inactive Prep Time: 2 hours

Ethnicity: German

Difficulty: Medium


Ingredients:


● 1 packages active dry yeast
● 3/4 cups warm water, (110 to 115 degrees)
● 1/2 cup warm milk, (110 to 115 degrees)
● 4 large whole eggs, (don't use egg substitute)
● 1 cup sugar
● 1/2 cup butter, (melted)
● 2 tsp salt
● 7 to 7 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Glaze
● 2 cups confectioners' sugar
● 3-4 tbsp milk
● 1 tbsp butter
● 1/2 tsp vanilla
● 1/4 cup walnuts, chopped




Directions:

In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in water and milk. Add pinch of sugar and proof for 10 minutes Add eggs, butter, salt and 3 cups of flour, beat until smooth. Add enough remaining flour to form a soft dough. Turn onto a floured surface, knead until
smooth and elastic, 6 to 8 minutes.

Place in a greased bowl, turn once to grease top. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours. (Put in oven with a pan of warm water under it, about 80°F.)

Punch dough down and divide into halves. Devide each half into thirds, roll out each third, and then braid them together. Place on greased baking sheet, shape as a cresent. Repeat with remaining half of dough. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 35 minutes.

Bake at 350° for 25 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on wire racks. Drizzle glaze over top.


After breakfast, read new books, play with toys, get dressed for dinner. Pretty informal all my life, sometimes we went out to our friends to ogle their gifts, etc, sometimes out to play, but it was mostly a do-what-you-want day.

Then, when I was young, off to grandma Porter for the Christmas meal and to meet up with the other family Porters and exchange gifts.

Even though most of my family is nominally Christian, it was more of a get-together celebration than anything else. Not a lot of pious talk.

[livius drusus]

Just the usual stuff here: tree, stockings, presents on Christmas Eve. We have two creche scenes we set up. One is a beautiful, delicate set of gray Murano glass complete with angel jazz band and a two-room stable made out of cork. The other is a Roman traditional nativity village which has the stable with the Holy Family and then about 300 hundred other characters.

Every year we'd buy a new figure at the Piazza Navona Christmas market, so over time the collection became huge. There are sausage vendors, bridges over rivers, umbrella pines, fishwives with their wares, milkmaids, blacksmiths, a well, children playing, ducks, fruit stands, drunk dudes with beer tankards in a pub, you name it, it's there. None of it is particularly Baby Jesus-pertinent, of course. It's really more like an old-timey Italian village.

[Sock Puppet]

Nothing particularly bizarre for us. When I was growing up, it was one smallish present on Christmas Eve to shut us the hell up, then the big haul in the morning. When my grandparents were visiting (most years), my granddad would sleep on the couch in the living room next to the tree, to "guard the tree and make sure Santa comes." One thing that seemed a little odd was that the stockings were always last, which was anticlimactic after we'd opened all the presents.

My wife's family had the Mexican tradition of staying up until midnight on Xmas Eve, and then opening the presents. That seemed bizarre to me, especially making the kids stay up that late to get their presents. Seems better to have them get their asses in bed 'cause presents don't arrive for wakeful kids. That means we're guaranteed to get bounced out of bed way too early, but my kid does that anyway.

What I took to right away, though, was tamales on Xmas morning for breakfast. My whitebread family thought tamales for breakfast was a little weird, but they didn't turn 'em down. The wife's family also always did pozole in massive drumlike pots, another tradition I'm quite okay with. :drool:

However, this thread has convinced me it's time for a new Xmas tradition:

The major Monde tradition though was the EGG NOG. The first batch would be made in the afternoon Christmas Eve and the blender would start up after breakfast the next morning for red eyed adults. In between that blender had very little peace. It's a very non traditional recipe, but soooooooo good. We would get cartons of the prepared eggnog from a local Texas dairy store known as Braums. To that we would add scoops of vanilla ice cream, liberal amounts of bourbon or brandy, maybe both if the maker was really gone and forgot they already put it in, slap on the lid and blend away. It is like the most decadent alchy milkshake you have ever had. Finish off with a little nutmeg, and get lit. This is another tradition I will keep until I die.
... crash the Monde place on Christmas Eve. Oh. Mah. Gawd.

[Demimonde]

:unrevel: Once you have it, Christmas won't be the same without it!

Tamales for Christmas sound fantastic. I am always jealous of my friends with this tradition. We don’t have any special menu that we have to stick to, but I lack the man power to pull it off. Now pozole we have done the last few times for New Years. I love it! I throw in a black eyed pea for each of the eaters though to keep that Texan tradition going. They disappear, and it’s cheating, but I count it. Before pozole came into my life - New Years was a brisket and of course black eyed peas.

[Sock Puppet]

Meh, the best way to get your tamales is to get somebody else to make them. The trick is finding somebody who makes them the way you like 'em. I bet I'd be soured on the tradition if I had to do all that friggin' work.