Jo here, celebrating Christmas in Whitby, with Charlie as a Christmas Elf and Billy as the Frost Elf. That's part of our tradition. Even if we start with approximately the same rites of Christmas, we soon all develop our own variations, don't we?
Some people decorate the tree weeks ahead. Others do it on Christmas Eve. In my home the tree and decorations came out when whichever of us were at boarding school came home. In our home now, we decorate at the beginning of December because we like the light and glitter of it all. But the Cabbage Patch Kids only make their trasformation on Christmas Eve. :)
Do you have any slightly different Christmas traditions, either from your family or developed on your own? Please share.
Below, I'm sharing a blog I did for the Romantic Novelists Association here in the UK. They wanted Christmas tree stories, and I thought readers here might like this.
When
my son was nearly one, I bought a Christmas tree on impulse at the
Sears Clearance Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. (To the left is a view of a snowy Halifax from our apartment window, where we spent our first Christmas treeless, waiting for Jonathan to be born. He arrived early on December 30th.)
Here's a picture from that first Christmas, with the tree in danger from curious fingers.
It was a very basic artificial tree, but over the years it became our tradition even as we moved across Canada to Montreal, then Ottawa, then Victoria.
When we decided to come home to England we thought its time had come, but we realized we could only put light stuff in some filing cabinets, so we packed the tree in it.
Now here it is, in Whitby, carrying 31 years of
Christmas memories,.
All joy of Christmastide!