Favourite Christmas Memories

My husband's cousin's wife posted this question and I wanted to answer it, but I had too many, so I am going to post it here.

Sitting with my siblings on Christmas Eve listening to the songs on the radio and trying to figure out who would sing which part in Silent Night by the Temptations.

When I was little, the little shiver of anticipation when I heard Santa's "Ho Ho Ho" and got up the next morning and saw a HUGE piece of chocolate cake missing. I learned years later it was just my uncle coming over to get a slice (hank of cake more like it) before heading home.

Watching 24 hours of A Christmas Story - This is a recent tradition. (last year, they played it on TBS instead of TNT and I missed it and stumbled upon it the next day by mistake in the last thirty minutes. I was soooooo mad. Even though I like Sinbad as a comedian, I was still pissed at 24 hours of Jingle All The Way)

The Christmas cleanup (another childhood thing). Every Christmas we had to do a big spring cleaning style clean up. If the room wasn't clean, Santa wouldn't visit. So every year, we had to come up with innovative ways to push the trash and toys around the room without actually cleaning up. Christmas cleanup was the best form of waiting-for-christmas-day procrastination ever.

Decorating the Christmas tree - My parents would get a tree either Christmas Eve or the day before. Then we would hurry to decorate the tree. When the house was quiet, I would turn off all the lights and lay on the sofa looking at the tree. I love the peace of Christmas lights. Also, Christmas was the only time I could be in the living room without getting yelled at.

And the number one best Christmas memory is - Every year, we would wake up way to early for Santa. We would walk out into the living room, all the lights would be on, my parents would be in their room (or gone because we wouldn't have dared walk into their rooms when they had the power to send Santa on his way if we weren't good) and there would be nothing. We would go back to bed just knowing Santa had missed us and go back to sleep (one year I cried myself to sleep. I think I was 7). Then we would wake up maybe two hours later and walk out of our room and the house would be dark except for the lights coming from the Christmas tree and we would walk into a room of toys, separated on the sofas by child. {I always had a teddy bear and an easy bake oven. My last Christmas teddy bear, which I still have, was the one I got when I was a senior in highschool. That bear went everywhere with me. } We would be so awed by the difference that we would quietly go to our toys and play with them until the need for batteries on something would force us to wake our parents. Then they would patiently do all the parent things like install batteries, open plastic cases and ooo and aaahh over my easy bake creations. That was always the best, waking up two times and loving that last wake up. I don't think the magic of that has died yet.

So, if you have Christmas memories, please share and my comments box can take what you can dish out.