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Create Your Own Personal Christmas Traditions
By: Donna D. Fontenot
Create Your Own Personal Christmas Traditions
The Christmas holidays are steeped in familiar, old traditions.
Decorating our homes, trimming the tree, exchanging gifts,
hanging mistletoe and many other traditions are staples of the
season. And while these old traditions can create warm memories,
you may be missing out on something special. This Christmas
season, take some time to consider creating your own special
family tradition. Perhaps a glimpse into my own family's unique
tradition will inspire you to discover one as well.
My Family's Personal Christmas Tradition
Many years ago, my mother became addicted to garage-saleing. She
would wake up bright and early every Friday and Saturday morning
(year-round), retrieve the newspaper from the driveway, and
circle all of the garage sales near her neighborhood that were
listed in the classified section. Then, with a group of 2-3
lifelong friends, she would begin her quest for that perfect
'gift' that someone else was discarding. She rarely paid more
than 50 cents for an item. The gifts were usually slighlty worn,
even a little broken. (In fact, many times a perfect item would
end up broken by the time she got it home. She was a little
clumsy). But by the end of each shopping trip, she would arrive
home with 10-20 items, that she would proudly display to my
father. He, of course, would usually groan, because he always
knew that she would be asking him to mend the broken pieces, or
re-paint an old item. Needless to say, by the end of a year, my
mother had managed to accumulate hundreds of 'special gifts',
but had spent very little money doing so.
A few days before Christmas, it would then be my job to help her
wrap all of these gifts. She generally bought as many Christmas
bags as she could find (at garage sales of course), so the task
was made somewhat simpler. All I had to do was throw the gift
into the bag, and mark it with a recipient's name. How did I
know who was to receive which gift? Well, Mom kept a running
list throughout the year which identified which item was
reserved for which member of the family. Of course, she often
mis-labeled things, so the male members of our family
occasionally received nice lingerie, while the female members
would receive a new hunting cap!
But really, this was the point of the whole tradition. Our
family has a wonderful sense of humor. Opening up 100's of
crazy, ridiculous gifts each year was so much more fun than
opening up one or two 'real' gifts. The standard question when
one of us would open a gift would be, "Ummm...what is this???".
There were many times when we never could figure out what the
gift was suppo....[MORE]
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