In the USA, Thanksgiving is a big deal at most people's houses.

Not so much at ours.  Oh, we get together, and my wife does a holiday menu - but Black Friday shopping is more of the thing.  She and I will do the stay out late Thursday thing, be there when stores open on Friday, etc. 

We then start putting up our Christmas tree and decorations.  We are now well into the double digits number of rubbermaid totes full of decorations - and this oesn't count the tree itself, the outdoor light up stuff, or odd things that don't go into totes (such as wreathes, etc). 

On Saturday, we do a TON of appetizer/party type foods while we decorate.  These get reheated on Sunday as we finish. 

This year's menu will include:

cheese tray w/crackers
chips & onion dip
pretzels & spicy dip
stuffed jalapenos
sliders
kielbasa slices
chicken fingers
wassail
one or two desserts
more to come?

Christmas Day is the big one.  We host a late lunch/early dinner at our house with just crazy amounts of food, and open gifts withthe extended family.  My wife will prep for a huge amount of Christmas Eve.  I will stay up, finsih wrapping presents, assemblign anything that Santa needs to assemble, make butterscotch fudge, and watch A Christmas Story and It's a Wonderful Life while I do (and cry at the latter).  I usually go to bed after daylight, get about an hour nap, then kill a couple of Monsters to stay functional. 

Woo, holidays!!

What are you traditions?

My family has always gone looking at the lights around town to see how people set up their houses. I'm hoping to continue this tradition with my own son. We also, when we lived out east, would search for a real tree and chop it down (My dad owns a few acres of forrested land out there) bring it home and then enjoy hot cocoa. 

This year I'm hoping to create a tradition of my own for my little one. We have always been allowed to open one present on christmas eve. Obviously this tradiition died out when me and my siblings grew older. For my son however, it is just beginning for him (He's only two) so i'm going to have a "christmas eve" present which will consist of a pair of jammies, some snacks of his liking, a beverage that will equal to his age bracket, and a movie. This is the tradition that I'd love to continue through the years with my son, as he gets older the snacks and beverages will obviously change. 

My mom also always has a tree decorating day where even us bigger kids will come to her place and help her decorate the tree and have hot cocoa and have music playing. 

((longer and more filled with Black Friday rage than anticipated when I started))

Thanksgiving

My family's 2 favorite holidays of the year are 4th of Julias (joo-lie-us, July+that side-of-the-family's last name, "Elias") and Thanksgiving. Presents are cool, but Thanksgiving is a celebration of delicious foods and crazy family fun.

My siblings and I have have learned to pace ourselves during Thanksgiving, since we have two in one day. One side of the family is a 1000 times more reserved than the other. That side, we go over to my grandma's in the afternoon, eat by 2:30-3, then grab a coffee and head up into the mountains for the crazy side's shenanigans (they're also better cooks, sooooo . . . ).

Black Friday

Black Friday is the devil. As someone who's family adores Thanksgiving, but who also had to work retail and leave her family to open a craft store at 7 effing PM Thanksgiving Day, for people already chomping at the bit to get their frickin craft deals, and then having to clean the wreckage they left behind after we closed again a few hours later, telling the last customer "It otay," when they say happily, having everything they want in their cart, "Aww, too back you have to work Thanksgiving, huh?" instead of telling them to go f*** themselves *hyperventilating*

Sorry, I blacked out there for a moment.

Black Friday represents the things I love fundamentally and which give me the purest sense of joy being turned into prison-grade toilet paper and being horrifically defiled at the hands of a bargain. And I like a bargain. But not at the cost of anyone else's soul. Am I being dramatic? Yes. But am I being too dramatic? Also yes. Anxiety allows me to be nothing less. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

/rant

Christmas Time

As a kid, I used to live about a mile away from a neighborhood called "Candy Cane Lane" because during the holidays the entire maze of a neighborhood would cover their properties in Christmas decorations. Even lamposts and such would be decorated. We'd join the migration of cars slowly driving through the neighborhood and gawk at all of the amazing designs.

We don't do that anymore though. Less people would participate in decorating and we all just got older.

At the beginning of each December my grandma on the docile family side gets all of us tickets to a Christmas play. We all grab dinner beforehand and then I put on my flame-retardant suit so as not to harm the other audience members when I burst into flame after setting foot on the sacred ground of the church the play takes place at. The plays are generally entertaining at the very least. At the end the family huddles up and we all pull names from a little box to determine who we are going to play secret Santa to that year.

When Christmas Eve rolls around we go to docile fam side Grandma house and hang out. It's mellow. We have a nice dinner, then presents are sorted, and we go around from youngest to oldest, each opening one present per round (we only have one secret Santa, but sometimes they get us a few things, and my Grandma always gets everyone an extra gift).

Later, our immediate family breaks off and we go either to my dad's or my sister's place. We open the presents we all got for each other, then my dad pulls out the board game he got for us. We all play the game and whoever wins gets to keep the board game.
That is probably one of my favorite parts of our Christmas tradition.

The next day is Christmas. My siblings and cousins all hop in our cars and we make our trek up into the mountains to my aunt's house. It's all just fun family time from there on out. The only people that get presents on that side are the little children, which is fine. The company is all we care about

Aaaaaaand those are pretty much my family's traditions!