Family Traditions

Now that Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is approaching, my family has started with some of our holiday traditions. Every year we start decorating the house for the holidays on the day after Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, my daughter was impatient, wanting to get started on decorating, but I insisted we wait on my husband. After all, it's not a family tradition unless the whole family is there to do it.

Once he got home from work, they headed up to the attic, which is where we thought we had stored all the Christmas stuff after our move this summer. Thankfully, we were right. It wouldn't have been fun searching the garage and shed to find those bins, especially since I bought a bunch on clearance one year to hold other stuff as well.

While I prefer a real tree and we've had one before, we usually just put up an artificial tree because it's easier. So the munchkin and I assembled the tree and started fluffing it out. Then we turned it over to my husband for the lights. He's taller than I am and less klutzy so it's better for him to do them.

Since we have dogs that are fascinated by anything shiny, we had to put the tree out of their reach so we put it on a table in the corner. We hadn't yet settled on a color scheme. Most year I do try to color coordinate my tree. Last year, for instance, was blue and silver. This year, however, my daughter wanted to use all of the ornaments. That's what we did.

While it doesn't show up well in this picture, there are about eight different packs of ornaments on the tree, plus various miscellaneous single ones.

My daughter handled the lower half of the tree while I did the upper half. As we came across certain ornaments, it brought back memories. One ball was from the munchkin's first Christmas, others she had made for us and a few had been given to me over the years by loved ones.

After the tree was all decked in ornaments, we gave the tree back to my husband to affix the star. Due to the tree being on a table, the top of it was brushing the ceiling and there wasn't room for the star on top. After a little thought, he managed to rig a way for the star to stay on the tree.

My daughter with one of the puppies in front of the tree. As you can see, we had to have the chair to decorate because the tree was up high. The big white ball with red lettering just below the star on the right side of the picture is from her first Christmas. The bright green ornament beside her head is her handprint in a flexible plaster. On the bottom right side of the tree is a mitten ornament she made. It's hard to see, but her picture is in the middle of it.

The final touch was the musical animals beneath the tree. When my daughter was a baby, I bought a singing Grinch to help decorate the house. The next Christmas, she picked out a singing reindeer. Since then, we've added a new singing Christmas item every year, including Santa and a caroling frog. We have four to date and will be going to pick out the one for this year soon.

We have other family traditions at the holidays, but this is the first of them. What family traditions do you have?