Christmas Traditions and The Winners of the Giveaway!

If you follow this blog enough, you will learn that I’m weird. Don’t worry, I still like myself but it’s just the truth. Face it, everyone has their quirks and I am certainly not exempt. Although, I tend to think my quirks are more awesome than everyone elses. Just being honest.

One of my quirks is that I LOVE to remember. It gives me warm fuzzies and who doesn’t love the warm fuzzies? (side note: the auto correct on my computer doesn’t seem to recognize the word, ‘fuzzies.’ Keeps wanting to change to fuzzes. What in the world?!?!) Anyway, I love to remember and to celebrate traditions. I’m an old soul with a sentimental bent. So, of course with it being Christmas Eve and all, a little rememberin’ is in tall order. Christmas Eve for my family was always full of tradition, as was every holiday actually. While I have a lot more, in the name of brevity, I have listed my top five favorite Christmas Eve/Christmas traditions for you to enjoy. I can just sense you sitting on the edge of your seat…

1. Decorating Christmas cookies…until midnight on Christmas Eve– My family is notorious for ‘running late,’ and so whether or not we started at 6 pm or 9 pm, we were going to bake and frost those cookies by golly. Being the perfectionist that I am, my sisters would regularly get frustrated with me for taking so long on each cookie. So what if I wanted to place each sprinkle individually? I had a vision in my head, people! It just so happened that it included spelling out words…with sprinkles. Again…weird.

2. Writing Santa a Christmas letter- Believe it or not, we started this family tradition ages ago and have kept it until this day. Every year, no matter what time of night, we sit down on Christmas Eve and write ‘Santa’ a letter telling him about our year. Everyone gets to give a short recap of their highlights and to request a few desired gifts. The older we get, the more I enjoy reading old letters and seeing all the life we have lived and the blessings our family has received. When finished, it is always left on the fireplace with the cookies and a carrot for Rudolph.

3. Santa’s reply– Now, I have to say that I don’t really believe in Santa but somehow he is always faithful to answer my Christmas letter. Every Christmas we wake up and read Santa’s response to the letter we wrote the night before. His handwriting always seems to resemble my mother’s or father’s for some strange reason. They must have had the same penmanship teacher growing up. Santa always leaves sentiments for the year that is coming to a close and gives well wishes for our upcoming year.

4. Slumber parties/Waking up- Don’t ask me how this tradition got started but for some reason on Christmas Eve my sisters and I have a slumber party on the our living room floor. Maybe it’s because we all wanted to be together. I like to think that. While this tradition doesn’t happen quite as much anymore since my sister’s husbands aren’t really on board, it used to be that we would pull out the sleeping bags and have ourselves an original Christmas slumber par-tay. Even up through college. To make it better, my father would ALWAYS come to wake us up in the morning with the same words. “Looks like Santa didn’t come, you all must have been bad this year.”  If for some reason he forgot to say it, we’d remind him and wouldn’t budge until he said it. We are quirky about tradition.

5. Christmas Breakfast with Chopsticks– I know, I know. Weird again but just wait. One Christmas, my father had just returned from a trip to China. He brought back each one of us a set of chopsticks and gave them to us as a Christmas gift. That Christmas we made the decision to try eating our breakfast with them and it just sort of stuck. So, now we eat our morning meal with chopsticks…cinnamon rolls, eggs, sausage and all. Needless to say, I’ve become a pretty talented chopstick user.

As stated before, we are a bit strange but the reality is…I love everything about it. I love it because it’s us and it encompasses so many sweet memories.

So, this ‘weirdo’ is wishing you a Christmas Eve filled with lots of love, laughter, chopsticks, slumber parties and sweet memories!!!

Also, I’m excited to announce the winners of the Mary Fields’ Holiday Giveaway Contest!!! Thank you to everyone who voted and to all my wonderful clients for being so wonderful! I am happy to announce that Autumn and Brian’s beautiful Florida farm wedding won and they will be receiving a 16X20″ gallery wrap canvas of their choice!