Traditions

When it comes to Christmas I'm all about traditions. (Sigh, every time I think about that I start singing Fiddler on the Roof). So when I read Jill Savage's blog about blogging about your family traditions as it relates to putting up Christmas decorations, I thought "this should be easy". Then I relived putting them up this year. I thought it would be fun if we always had Chinese food on the day we put the decorations up. Fun, but impractical. We don't really have any good Chinese in town, so scratch that. We had Italian this year...it's red...maybe we'll continue that. We do always rotate who puts the star on the tree, but that also leads to the tradition of a huge "discussion" prior as to who's turn it is to do the task. I usually end up having to pull up pictures from last year to see who did it then. And then there is the tradition of me standing in the middle of the living room stating rather firmly (some would say with a raised voice, but I'm not convinced) that you CAN'T TOUCH ANY OF THE ORNAMENTS UNTIL I HAND THEM TO YOU! YOU MIGHT BREAK SOMETHING! The one tradition that we don't have and I'm rather glad to be done with is the untangling of all the lights and plugging them in and checking them one by one to see which light is out and then plugging them in again and then finally getting to put them on the tree. That doesn't mean that we don't have any related to lights....I changed out 40 bulbs on our tree and am still trying to figure out how to get the lights to hang on the front window. They hung on there last year, but I also remember going through the same dilemma as to how to get them to stay. It seems like I do that every year. Does that make it a tradition? How about the tradition of Joe and I going back to the tree after the kids have gone to bed and rearranging all the decorations? Yes, we definitely have some traditions as it relates to putting our Christmas decorations up. And they definitely aren't the ones I would choose to have, but that is what makes us our own little family. And I think the goal was somehow met this year in the words of Sara at the end of the evening "This is a special night, isn't it Mom?" Some of the best traditions are the ones we don't try to create, but just sort of happen on their own.