Traditions..........

I don't know if we really have any major traditions, but we always make it a point to watch 24-hours of A Christmas Story. Gotta love Ralphie! My friends and I also have a fireworks extravaganza on Christmas Eve.

we always go to my grandmother's on christmas eve. we have watched christmas vacation every christmas since it came out on vhs.

it is fun to drive around and look at all the "griswald like" decoration displays too. []

Ever since my eldest sister was born, 24 years ago, my parents have tape recorded all our Christmases. It's heartwarming to watch myself at 5 years old, so excited about this time.

I think it's a wonderful idea for anyone who has children. It's a great way to keep the memories.

Since I meet my boyfriend I have been celebrating x-mas with his family. Every year they go to a little island in the Bahamas and rent a beach house for about a month. His dad likes to spear hunt lobster and we eat that during the holidays. X-mas eve we go to a fancy island restaurant to eat. For x-mas morning we open the gifts under the inflatable x-mas tree (since real pine trees are hard to come by on the island)

It's a fun get-away but I really do miss my family back in NM. I call them on x-mas day and it#%92s feel so nice to hear their voices. My mom leaves the tree up till I get back, when I finally get back to the US I open my gift from my side of the family and we have a mini x-mas cellebaration.

When my boys were little they would bug me to open presents before Christmas.  So I started hanging small gift bags with little presents in them on the tree and they knew they could open these when they got up on Christmas Eve day. Now they're almost 30 and almost 36 and DGS is 13, but we still do that and they still look forward to it almost as much as Christmas Day.
 
Joyce

Every year around Christmas time my family rents How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original cartoon version) and orders out the famous local Town Spa Pizza and eat it in front of the movie.  We've done it every year since as long as I can remember and I love it...[]
 
When I was younger I could never sleep on Christmas Eve night.  I'd get so excited that I'd wake up at 2 am almost on the dot every year... so it's been my own personal tradition to sneak out of my room  in the wee hours of the morning around 5ish and sit on the heater grate beside the tree and turn only the tree lights on.  It was such an incredible feeling sitting amongst piles of presents in a dark room illuminated by only these beautiful colorful, lights blinking now and then, engulfed in the smell of pine tree and Christmas.  It was beautiful...I still do that to this day, for old time's sakes.

[]My favorite time is Christmas eve…we spend it with my step kids and after having a huge and delicious dinner… we go for a walk around the neighborhood and look at holiday lights and we bring hot cocoa with us.     

Then we open stockings and 1 present each (it is always the package that contains the X-Mas eve PJ#%92s). Then we all get into our new jammies and curl up on the couch together and watch the year without a Santa Clause and Santa Clause is coming to town.   The kids stay the night and then the next morning we wake up early and have sweet rolls, coffee or hot cocoa and open all our packages from one another.  After that we all have to go our own ways to fit in all the rest of the family.    

The kids are now 20 and 22 and we have been doing this same x-mas eve tradition for the past 11 years.  We all come from divorced families and feel the pressure of having to “fit in” time for everyone, but all 4 of us agree that the BEST part of Christmas is our Christmas Eve tradition and we can#%92t imagine how empty it would feel without it!  []

My husband is Scottish -- literally he is FROM Scotland and wow -- talk about culture clash.  His family always did so many things SO differently -- even their gift-giving is different.  So David and I have had to carefully cultivate traditions with each other. 
 
Eg -- his Mum 'n Dad would load all the kids presents into potato sacks and leave them outside their doors.  So each kid was literally welcome to wake up at any time and if the bag was there they could drag it into their room and open their gifts IN SECRET.  **and** on their beds.  I couldn't even imagine that.
 
My family?  Mom Dad and I opened our gifts on Christmas Eve -- just us -- no "command performance" at either Grandparents' home.  My parents 50 odd years later, still want to do that OVER THE PHONE if nothing else (they're in NY State, and I'm in Florida). 
 
The idea of opening gifts in secret makes me cringe -- I want to SEE someone open their gifts -- I want to SEE their face/hear their voice. 
 
Compromise?  The first year we were married I found orange sacks (the kinda 'netting' ones?) and ordered two of them -- I put part of our gifts in our stockings, and part of them go in the orange sacks. 
 
So ... we "have our stockings" (open those presents) and "our orange sacks" on Christmas morning *together* IN BED. 
 
Now this is a challenge folks -- we have a WATER bed!! sheesh -- talk about rocking and rolling LOL. 
 
However -- further -- his family always put a fresh orange and an apple in that onion sack.  And the smell of it MEANS Christmas to my husband.  So I always make sure there is an orange and an apple in that sack for him.  INterestingly -- he never eats them -- it IS the smell.  British oranges tend to be very small and quite bitter (not like our juice or navel oranges).  This tends to be why Brits use orange peel as a flavor or 'zest' (like in marmalade) - because the oranges tend not to be super wonderful to eat. 
 
We also have our own lemon tree -- and typically they are ripe just about Christmas.  So usually I put a lemon in the sack as well and instead of pumpkin pie I tend to make lemon pie for Christmas!  Just cos it's ours.
 
And fwiw -- be cautious.  If your husband truly hates the holisdays, I'd make an attempt to find out what's up with it.  You could do yourself some serious damage building up bitterness there. 
 
It may have been something as simple as disappointments or presents on demand he couldn't afford.  David's Mum passed away literally a couple of days after Christmas and it was difficult for him at first.  A friend of mine couldn't deal with Christmas because after her MOm passed she just couldn't face doing things without her Mom. 
 
It's not fair of him to 'hate the holidays' -- but getting him to losen up may help.  Try something completely different -- it might help.

I had the hardest time adjusting to my boyfriends family#%92s traditions.

For one thing they open gift Christmas morning, my family does it Christmas eve. It may not seem like much but dinner and then going straight to bed isn't what I was use to. I had an almost sinking feeling in my stomach the first x-mas I was with my BF's family, like something was just missing, I just felt sad. Then calling from the Bahamas is somewhere around $3 to $6/min to the US so I had to keep my talk time short. It was my first x-mas away from my family and at the time I had many regrets and for the first time I didn't go to x-mas church.

Another hard part for me was understanding his family's table manors. They had set the table with way too many fancy silverware and had wine glasses set out with fancy decorations. My family isn't much for proper dinner etiquette so I had no clue what I was suppose to eat first or what fork went with what food. I didn't even like the taste of wine but drank it anyway.

His family is so different than mine and just understanding the way it all worked was difficult for me. His mom calls me and exotic princess and really likes me a lot as do the rest of his family. I'm sure they got a bit of a laugh out of the first year I celebrated the holidays with them and that#%92s why they keep inviting me back every year. I'm so thankful for everything they do, they are the ones who pay for my plain ticket to go there otherwise I couldn't afford it.

One strange thing about being on the island is there is not many Hispanics that visit that island so I do get a lot of stares from the Bahamians. I get asked where I'm from and what language I speek. My boyfriend is as white as they come so it's stange to see a person of my color with a guy like him. Nothing raciest, it's just not common in that countrie. And then driving on the left side of the road really thew me off at first. It was everthing put together, meeting his family in a foreign land just caught me totally by surprise.

Our Christmas is in the middle of summer, just about, so we do some pretty different things. Our family normally has Christmas lunch with the relatives that have a swimming pool. We have a big lunch with lots of nice salads and normally there's a cold turkey and a cold leg of ham. We get 2 deserts because we usually do the traditional pudding as well as the Australian tradition of pavlova. I don't know if you guys know what a pav is, but it's basically a big maringue topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit. We have champagne and wear paper hats from our bon bons.

The one thing that we do, which is different...my DH's family is French Canadian, so we have touques (sp...meat pies) on Christmas Eve.  They are made of ground beef and pork, potatoes and cloves in a pastry crust.  So so good.  His Mom used the meat mixture as turkey stuffing also.  Originally these meat pies were eaten after midnight Mass, but I find that far too late a night, so we do them after an earlier church service.  Oh, and my husband usually sings "Sweet Little Jesus Boy" at one of our 3 candlelight services.  

Gotta watch the old animated "[color=#339900]How The Grinch Stole Xmas"...that's non negotiable [/color][]
 
One thing I HATE that my DH's family does is open the gifts one at a time and everyone ooh's and ahh's over it....GAG ME...
 
I am much more comfy with mass package opening hysteria. I mean what's more embarrassing to both parties when you open some HIDEOUS gift and everyone's staring at you and you pretend to like it? please.....no thanks.

Callie, my Scots heritage is coming through here....we ALWAYS got a big orange or grapefruit in the toe of our stocking. I never knew that wasn't how it was for everyone! We also opened the stockings in bed, for sure!

But then it was down to the Christmas tree in the morning, and we usually took turns opening presents. We didn't always have a LOT of presents, so opening them one at a time made them seem like there were more, Gina.

For Thanksgiving we always had the regular fare, turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, etc. But one thing we always had was creamed peas with baby onions. I always made the same dinner for my son and I and whoever came over, and if I didn't buy the stuff for creamed peas he'd get very bent out of shape! He LOVES those!

Back in the days beforen cable TV, when there were just one or two stations, they'd always show The Wizard of Oz, or, I remember one year, [linkhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057950/]Cinderella[/link] (the live action one with Leslie Ann Warren). Egads, that was 1965! Anyway, I sure remember being thrilled by it!

So we'd always watch The Wizard of Oz as a special treat. Of course over the years we also watched Miracle on 34th Street, and It's a Wonderful Life, but not as a special Christmas Eve treat.

As an adult, I just LOVE A Christmas Story. I remember my sister being so scared she peed on Santa... (hehehehe!!) I'm old enough to remember department stores just like the one depicted.

Jean -- thanks.  David's never been sure if it was just HIS family that did the "presents in bed" thing but it is SO integral to him.  As time has passed (and both of us get a tad seasick eventually on the waterbed) we start out in the bed, but once we've done the orange sack and 'stockings' then we move out next to the tree.  Of course dogs bouncing on the bed doesn't help either LOL