Hello friends! I hope you all are enjoying this crazy Mississippi weather, and maybe starting to make your lists and check things off getting ready for all these big holidays coming up!
The end of the year holidays are my very favorite. My family has always made sure we celebrated them all to the fullest, from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years, but we all know Christmas is the star of the season. So I decided to share a little bit of my Christmas with you, and maybe see how your memories compared.
Crushing on one of these trees! I spent many childhood hours playing with my grandmama's tree like this, and I want one just like it!
Favorite Christmas movie: The Santa Clause and the original 'How The Grinch Stole Christmas'. If it doesn't come on at least three times a Christmas, I get sad. Maybe this year I can catch it on the DVR!
Least favorite Christmas movie: It's a tossup between, and I know half the planet Earth is going to want to crucify me after I say them, A Christmas Story and Elf. Oh how I hate both of them! A Christmas Story comes on only once a year, thank the Lord, but it's on over and over, ALL DAY LONG, on Christmas day. It has a few good lines, but I could never see it again and be content.. And Elf...I'm just not a Will Ferrell fan, and Elf just doesn't light my fire
Favorite Christmas carol: O Holy Night. I can hear it dozens of times each Christmas, but I still have times when I hear it and get chills.
Favorite holiday food: I love when the Christmas popcorn buckets come in. At our house, the caramel and cheese go fast, and nobody ever eats the plain butter flavor.
People puppy chow. Also known as muddy buddies. Make it every Christmas and eat myself sick on it, but it's soooo good. We just made a batch this weekend...and it's almost gone already.
I'm not sure what the proper name is, but that cornflake-peanut butter candy...oh me. That stuff is good.
Regular candy canes. No, they don't taste the same as regular peppermints do. It's candy cane flavor. And it's a once a year, special, Christmas thing I look forward to all year long.
What does your family do for Christmas Eve? On Christmas Eve afternoon, we try to go out as a family and eat an early supper, then see a movie. Nobody else is ever in the theater with us, so it's like we have the theater to ourselves. If there isn't anything playing we want to see, we stay home, put on our Christmas pajamas, put glass bottled Cokes in the freezer until they get slushy, and drink them while we play cards or board games.
What does your family do for Christmas Day? We get up around nine or ten, open our presents together, then my grandparents come over to see what all we got. We cook a huge breakfast and eat together, then spend the rest of the afternoon putting together presents or watching our new DVDs.
What are your favorite Christmas traditions? When I was a kid, it was being in the Christmas play. Now as an adult, it's singing the Christmas Cantata the Sunday before Christmas after we eat breakfast together as a church.
Putting together Christmas shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child every year, especially after being able to go to Atlanta to work in the shoebox processing center and see the tons and tons of boxes getting ready to go out all over the world.
Christmas present scavenger hunts, if you are getting a particularly good present.
Candy in your stockings. Every person gets a bag of 'their' candy. My dad's is always Hershey Kisses, mama's is KitKats, Molly's is Reeses, and mine varies from year to year, but I think this year I'll pick peanut butter M&Ms :)
Wrapping presents. I love to wrap all the presents, it's very relaxing for me.
This one is kind of a generic fall one, but annual Dressing Day with my mama and grandmama. Once a year, we take a day and make up all the chicken dressing we're going to eat for the entire next year.
What's your decorating strategy? This is a little hard for me at present, being as I don't have a house of myself where I have full reign of the decorating choices. My mom is mostly alright with me throwing my opinions around with decorating, but it is her house and her final say so.
My personal Christmas decorating style, and I can't wait until I have my own house to decorate, is very simple. I love silver and white and brown and green, and I love decorating with old things and natural things.
What's your personal wrapping style? I would love to be one of those people who wrapped all their presents in matching, one color paper, and had gorgeous bows and tags and trimmings. But...I am not that dedicated. I wrap the things that have to be wrapped in two or three different kinds of paper, and I try to get designs that coordinate. The majority of the presents tho...we bag wrap. I love gift bags because they're so reusable! Six Christmases later, still recycling the same bags.
Best Christmas present ever? Definitely the Christmas I was fifteen, when my parents surprised me with a car. I already had my permit, was getting my license the next week, and we had been talking about going car shopping when Christmas died down. Come Christmas morning, I got a box with a note and a set of keys. I ran outside barefoot and in my pajamas to a pretty little Jeep with a big red bow. It was really hard to settle down and eat breakfast with everybody afterwards when all I wanted to do was go for a ride!
Christmas traditions you're glad you don't keep: There are two big ones I can think of right off the top of my head. First one, and the biggest one, is Black Friday. For lots of people that's their Christmas shopping, all done in one day, and they love the rush and the competition and the chaos. But I've been once, and I can't see the attraction. I'm content to start shopping early and find deals and not have to fight everyone else in the mall for it. The second one is having to dress up fancy for family Christmas dinners. You always see on TV where the people all wear dresses and ties to eat, and use fancy china and cloth napkins, and they just look miserable. I"m happy my family know that it's still Christmas even when we wear jeans and eat off paper plates!
