Collecting Christmas traditions

It seems that everybody has a different holiday tradition.

Ours is driving around looking at Christmas lights on Christmas Eve.

I was so excited when we bought a van and we could take my mom and brother, and force my dad to go. (He’s not exactly a fan of riding around for any reason.)

Every year we tell the same story about my now 27-year-old, who was just a few years old at the time. One Christmas Eve when we were in Jonesboro, we went looking at lights in all my mom’s favorite neighborhoods — and she knew who lived at every other house. So, we got to hear stories as we slowly cruised the neighborhoods — who was married to whom — or not any more — whose daughter had gone to high school where my mom taught and how cute she looked at prom, and other little tidbits.

My child finally said, “Put a sock in it, Grandmomma.”

We laughed, but he also got in trouble. The next day during Christmas, my dad handed my mom a pair of socks and said, “These are from John.”

I asked my co-workers about their traditions, and I heard some that were a little different.

One woman was excited because she was planning to take a day off, as she does every year, to go Christmas shopping with her husband. They will eat lunch at Chili’s and, as always, have beer and fajitas. I guess that’s getting the Christmas “spirits.”

Another young woman told me, “Oh, we do something really neat!” She thought maybe I’d heard of it.

On Christmas Day, her friends and family have a contest to see who can call each other first and say, “Christmas gift!” Then they have bragging rights the rest of the year.

Another co-worker and I just looked at her funny, waiting for the punch line, but that’s it. That’s the game. This girl said one year it got out of hand, and friends were calling at the crack of dawn to be the first to say “Christmas gift!” Ookaaaay. To each his own. Another employee said, “We did kind of have a tradition in my family — we’d go out and get our Christmas tree on my brother’s birthday, which I think is the 18th.” (Close family.) They waited that late because the wood-burning stove would dry out the tree, she said.

“I was never allowed to chop it because they were like, ‘You’ll chop your hand off, get back,’” she recalled with a hint of regret.

She also makes it a point to watch The Walton Family Christmas on Christmas Day, along with

sometime during the season.

Some people mentioned other holiday shows — such as (one of my family’s traditions to watch) and the always popular A Christmas Story (say it with me now, “You’ll shoot your eye out!”)

My mother-in-law always made Christmas Eve stew, which was delicious, and we’d have a rolled-up ice-cream thing for dessert that I can’t spell. One year my husband’s sleeve caught on fire in the candle on the table Christmas Eve, but we decided not to make that a tradition.

I’m thinking of starting that Christmas gift game, though. “Christmas gift!” Hey, I win.