always went to my parents’ house on Christmas Day. All of us (my parents, me, my husband, brothers, SIL, nieces, nephew) would open our gifts and then have a Christmas dinner. My husband and I started a tradition of having a Christmas Eve dinner together, just the two of us, and exchanging our gifts to each other after dinner. After a couple of years, we switched from a Baptist church to a Methodist church that has a Christmas Eve service (the Baptist church never had a service on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day unless one of those days happened to be Sunday). The pattern for Christmas Eve then became church, dinner, gifts (and, for some years, a second late evening church service). Meanwhile, my mother finally had to admit pulling off a Christmas dinner was too much, and we went to finger foods or sandwiches. Then she decided that getting everything wrapped and ready by the 25th was too hard, and my brother and his family kept arriving later and later every year because they would spend the afternoon at her mother’s house 120 miles away, so the family Christmas get-together got moved to the Saturday after Christmas, then to the Saturday after New Year’s, then to the second Saturday in January. Christmas Day itself became a non-event. We still keep our tradition of having our dinner and gift exchange on Christmas Eve, and of course, the church service is still that evening as well. Christmas Day is now just a nice day off from work to relax.
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I guess there are a lot of Leprechaun Unicorn Beer Hawaiian Shirt Christmas decorations – I just never think of them from that poin of view. I seem to think and I value Christmas decorations through their meaning and my traditions, not their prettiness. My traditions are a mixture of the Finnish and general North European traditions, mostly from Sweden and Germany, I think. In general, Christmas isn’t called Christ Mass here. We talk about it by the old Norse? word Yule. That’s Joulu in Finnish. I think that’s important. The name doesn’t refer to any Christian features and it’s pretty easy to celebrate Joulu without any particularly Christian context under that name. I value quite simple decorations that I feel some kind of connection with. The christmas tree is a must. It isn’t very old tradition in Finland, but it’s a very natural decoration that was easy to adopt. (There is an ancient tradition to decorate houses with small birches in Midsummer, so a christmas tree feels like a good equivalent in the winter).
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