What’s a favorite Christmas tradition in your family? I grew up with a lot of traditions. Both of my grandparents lived close to us after I was four years old, so we could visit them both at Christmas. Every Christmas Eve, we would drive to my dad’s parents’ house, have supper, and open my grandparents’ gifts to us kids. On Christmas morning, we opened our gifts from Santa at home. Then we’d go to my mom’s parents for a Christmas feast at lunch.
When I married, I had to merge my traditions with the ones my husband grew up with. Figuring out whether we would have a live or fake tree was a big decision in our marriage, which I wrote about in a humorous essay for the hardback version of Christmas fiction off the beaten path.
Now that we have kids, we’re developing our own traditions, such as watching the 1983 Christmas special, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, on Christmas Eve after we get home from the Christmas Eve service. My youngest has assigned himself the role of doing our outside decorations. Our front yard glows with lights everywhere and an army of inflatables, all connected with a maze of power cords. I really want to write a Christmas crime story in which the bad guy tries to escape the law at the climax but foolishly runs through someone’s front yard that’s decorated like mine and gets tripped up in all the cords.
So what’s one of your favorite Christmas traditions? Writers, have you used one of your traditions in a story?
Reading the biblical Christmas story from Luke 2.