To me, the holidays aren't just a time where the family gets together, responsibilities are more relaxed, and I have to wear ugly sweaters for Christmas card pictures; it's a time when all the little fond memories come flooding back and give me that sense of home. Little moments from my childhood that just click when I think about being home for the holidays.
One of my
When I was young, my mom bought one of my first ornaments for our Christmas tree; it was a glass ballerina with some gold trip around its shoes and sparkles on its tutu. I wasn't allowed to hold it until I was older because she was afraid I'd break it, but I ended up breaking it either way. It sat in the ornament box for a few years until I saw it and asked her to hot glue it so we could hang it up. This process happened with several ornaments, including a glass angel, nutcrackers, and icicles. Let's just say we aren't the luckiest with glass ornaments.
It's been a tradition for years now that every Christmas Eve, my brother, sister and I take turns looking for a pickle ornament and whoever finds it first gets to open their presents first on Christmas morning. For the first few years, my sister was only a baby so we let her win by default. However, when she got old enough to look for herself, it was a full-on competition. Of course, it only ever lasts for a few minutes, then someone shoves their hand inside the branches of our Christmas tree and pulls out a shiny pickle.
The pickle tradition never really stopped me from figuring out what I was getting. I used to have a really bad habit of ripping the tape on my presents to see what they were, and obviously, my parents figured it out pretty quickly. There was one year near the beginning of the problem where they had hidden all the presents in our spare room, and I had found them so I opened one of them up and started playing with it. My mom came in and as far as I can remember she just wrapped it back up and I was grounded for a while, but on Christmas morning I still got the toy.
One of the most ingrained memories I have is my mom reading "The Night Before Christmas" to my siblings and me before bed on Christmas Eve. We'd all pile into her bed after laying out cookies for Santa and making sure the doors to the living room and den were locked so nobody could sneak downstairs and peek, and she'd read it to us. I always looked forward to it as a child; as an adult now I know we don't take it as seriously, but it's one of the things I want to bring with me later in life if I have a family of my own someday.
The holidays aren't just a time of give and take, it's really a time of rememberance and thankfulness. I have so many amazing memories from my childhood, along with a few I'd like to forget, but I think they make me look forward to the holidays to come because it's just a chance to make even more memories and traditions with my family.
