Lol, Terry and Ina.....my only bad Christmas memory was accidently opening an inapproprite gift in front of my children....I don't think they saw because I quickly grabbed it and said it was wrong size or color. My husband wasn't thinking...
Yes both funny stories Ina and Chrissy, ...........I have another funny/scary not particularly Christmas story, but this one concerns gas pipes, of which we had many hundreds of yards of in the grocery shop where I was raised. The previous owner had worked for the local Gas company and had taken advantage of this by installing gas lights everywhere in the house and garden sheds. Every now and then because they were old lead pipes they would spring a leak, particularly the ones under the living room floor. The smell of gas would prompt my father to send me under the floor to investigate as I was small enough you crawl in the void. I would trace the leak by running a candle flame along the pipe until I got a small flame where the leak was, I then hammered the pipe to seal it. Looking back on the apparent risks involved, I have come to the conclusion that my parents were unwittingly bringing up their children according to the "Continuum Concept" where children were not unduly protected from the dangers in life, thus learning through survival and helping the species evolve "...........She related stories of watching babies crawl around near deep pits and play with knives and fire as examples of trusting a toddler's inherent instincts toward self protection. She posits that children hurting themselves is basically a self-fulfilling prophesy put forth by the parents with statement like "you'll cut yourself.............." I feel in the current health and safety conditions we live in this would be considered to be neglect but I survived and learnt to not be unduly fearful of most things in life
@Terry Page , They do say,"Ignorance is bliss". Well it sounds like that appied to some of your escapades. Sometimes that is all the protection we have. I think my parents must have had the same thoughts on child rearing. I was wondering how some of you explained to your children that Santa wasn't real, or what you came up with if they found out and asked you? Of course my oldest just acted like he had known all along, but my youngest's face looked at me like, "Mommy you lied. How could you?". I admit it hurt my heart, and I promised to always tell him the truth, and that I know of, I never did again. So how did you and your children behave when they found out there was no Santa.
It does seem all wrong to lie while teaching them honesty. I told my children early on so there were never hurt feelings. As a child myself, I remember being a little disappointed but quickly got over it when I realized it didn't change anything…still got presents, had a tree, celebrated, and the added knowledge that my own parents were the generous ones. I think children need to know very early before tradition sets in, or very late when they understand like I did. The only problem with waiting until later is that you run the risk of them finding out at school and being ridiculed by peers for believing….sadly, it happens.
While there are sharp differences in the celebration of Christmas in different parts of the world, there are some pretty dramatic differences between families or in different parts of the United States, as well. In my family, as a child, Christmas Day was more about church and family than about getting presents. We opened the bulk of our presents after supper on Christmas Eve, leaving only the one big present that we might receive for Christmas morning, and that was the one that came from Santa. So if I was going to get a bicycle, that would be by the tree on Christmas morning, while all of the gifts that I received from other family members and relatives will have already been opened on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve supper was a big one, but just for the immediate family, which might include the grandparents whenever we came up in the rotation, since they had several children living in the same small town. Being a Swedish family, lutefisk was always on the table, having stunk up the house for hours while it was cooking. No one in the family ate the stuff except for my father, and I strongly suspected that he ate only a small amount of it. As I remember it, the dogs wouldn't even eat the lutefisk; the cats would, so they feasted. Other than the lutefisk, pretty much everything else on the table was edible, and fairly typical Christmas fare, which was sometimes built around ham, but sometimes turkey or even goose, but ham was my favorite. Typically, there would also be both sweet potatoes and regular potatoes, the latter mashed and served with gravy. There would be cranberry sauce, of course, and a couple of vegetables, one of them being corn. Apart from the main meat dish, there would also be potato sausage. There were a lot of other things as well, but these are the ones that come to mind. Usually, in my family, we could leave the table when we were reasonably through, having eaten whatever mom might consider to have been enough. On Christmas Eve, however, we couldn't leave the table until everyone was done. Knowing that we were anxious to open our presents, dad would take forever over supper, which includes several cups of coffee after he had eaten. Finally, we'd be able to open all of the presents that were under the tree, with one big present for each of us safely hidden away somewhere, to be moved to under the tree while we were sleeping that night. Not every wrapped box under the tree was a real gift, since we would have great fun wrapping up rocks or broken toys and stuff for one another, and we'd often find a very small gift at the bottom of several layers of successively larger boxes. That made it harder to guess what we might have gotten. After we opened our presents, we would have a few hours to play with our toys and stuff, but we had to be in bed fairly early. For one thing, Santa wouldn't come if we were awake. For another, Christmas Day began with a 4:00 a.m. Christmas service at church. The Christmas service was like a dream. We would be awakened at about 3:30 a.m. to get ready. Getting ready wasn't as big of a deal as getting ready for a regular Sunday service might be, since the 4:00 a.m. service was casual. It went on for an hour, but I doubt that anyone ever remembered anything that was said or done there. After the Christmas service, we'd go back to bed until a more reasonable hour, and it would be little more than a badly remembered dream by the time we got up. More than once, I didn't remember any of it. When we got up, we'd find the big present under the tree. The big presents were there when we got up for the 4:00 a.m. service because we'd know if someone got a bicycle, since that was a pretty hard one to disguise. But we couldn't open them until we had gotten up the second time. Afterwards, we'd have a few hours to play with our stuff, and were pretty much relegated either to our rooms, outdoors, or to the barn, since mom would be getting ready for the next Christmas dinner. At noon on Christmas Day, we would have other Christmas guests. It might be the grandparents, if they had spent the previous day with an uncle and aunt, or it might be the pastor and his family. Fortunately, we didn't fit into his rotation very often because no one could act normally while the pastor was there. We didn't even use the real living room, but the normally off-limits front room. That wasn't any fun because we were afraid even to sit on the furniture in the front room. If we had turkey on Christmas Eve, we would have ham on Christmas Day, or vice versa. No lutefisk, however. There would be another Christmas service at church at 5:00 p.m. on Christmas. This would be the one in which the children's groups would perform. Afterwards, we could stay up late. Mom never made us help with either the preparation or cleanup, and we mostly never thought to offer. Dad would help clear the table, but everything else was up to mom. We would usually have two decorated Christmas trees, both cut on our land. The larger tree would be in the living room, and that's the one that the gifts would be under. A smaller one would be in the mostly off-limits front room, I think so that people could see it in the window as they drove by. That was how we did Christmas.
We never opened anything on Christmas Day, I really don't even remember what we did as children then, maybe played with our toys? At my daughter's we open presents from family Christmas Eve, after the meal and on Christmas morning the kids open the presents from Santa...even though the oldest is 16 he still would act like there was a Santa for the benefit of his younger brother. Plus it meant more presents! We weren't a religious family so we didn't go to church, even though I went to a catholic school for 3 years. I have gone to a few midnight masses but even though we try for them now we are usually too tired. The most beautiful Christmas Eve service I ever went to was when I lived in Hungary and the Basilica in the next town was celebrating its 1,000 yr anniversary....it was BEAUTIFUL! Thinking about that now leaves me with mixed emotions....it was a magical and beautiful service but my husband was already dealing with the return of his colon cancer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Stephen's_Basilica
@Ken Anderson , now that to me is what I always dreamed Christmas was suppose to be like. @Chrissy Page , I didn't go to a church either, but my two step-daughters were brought up Catholic, and I let my boys choose to go to a Protestant church. Christmas day had me up early to drop off the girls at St. Pius, and then head for the boys church. I would quickly drive home to get the days feast started, then I would be running back to pick up all the kids. By 2:00 pm., my house would explode with relative, and whomever my children would invite, plus anyone we thought might not have a place to spend the holiday. I never had any problems sleeping on Christmas night.
There was a St.Pius church near us in Pittsburgh, Ina...I had forgotten about it til now. I went to Our Lady of Loretta for church on occasion and Catechism once a week til 8th grade, except the years I went to a catholic school.
@Chrissy Page , many people have concidered me and my family was very odd. Mainly because my home held three different types of faith, Catholic, Protestant, and American Indian. My Canadian Indian grandfather was Catholic, My American Indian mother was Cristian, My American Indian grandmother was niether. My husband was a first generation Italian Catholic, and my Greman father was a Hard Shell Baptist. Confusing huh? My American Indian grandmother made the most sense to me, and she taught me that no matter what being you believe in, as long as you had the faith that there was a greater being than man, you were on the right track. She would say, " There are many birds, all have different songs , and if you will just listen, you will hear the Creator's voice in all their songs".
My oldest brother, when he married and had children, decided to do something entirely different. In their family, Christmas was all about celebrating the birth of Christ. There was no tree, no decorations, and not exchanging of gifts on Christmas. Instead, the celebrated Christmas on January 7, which is Christmas Day in the Gregorian calendar. Although they were not Eastern Orthodox, they chose that day simply because it had a tie-in with Christmas. They decorated the house and set up the tree on January 1, and exchanged gifts on January 7, thus keeping Christmas for Christ, and taking advantage of all of the after Christmas sales to be able to buy even more stuff for one another.
When I got married and we bought our first house in Malvern, we started going to midnight mass in the nearby Malvern Priory, which was a lovely experience it being a candlelight service in an ancient building that dates to 1085. We weren't religious but it felt a good way to start celebrating Christmas. My mother and my sister often accompanied us and I have lots of pleasant memories around those times.
A good idea to separate it from all the commercial stuff that has virtually taken over Christmas for a while now. It's January 7th here in Russia, the 25th December being a normal working day, the Russian Orthodox church is followed by most of the population young and old, though Christmas itself is not celebrated on such a large scale as in the west.,New Year being the big festival.
Wow. I wish I had known about the January 7th. celebration when my children were young. I really didn't understand how people were connecting the birth of Crist, and Santa. Two different days makes so much more sense.