Holidays--Oh how swiftly they fly!

Even as I kid, I always thought that there was something one-sided about the way holidays worked: for weeks and even months you build up to and anticipate the Big Day (in my family, Christmas, though for some people it’s birthdays or another celebration), then in a mere 24 hours, it comes and goes and suddenly you’re left with a lot of empty boxes and torn wrapping paper. Well, in our case, wrapping paper with the tape neatly sliced open, but still.

The whole build-up followed by an almost instantaneous tearing down of decorations and return to non-seasonal radio selections is really a modern thing. The Christmas season, liturgically and according to the celebrations throughout most of history, BEGINS on the 25th and doesn’t end until the Feast of the Epiphany a week and a half later. (How many people these days know that the twelve days of Christmas START on the 25th and go through the 5th of January?)

My family is chock full of holiday traditions, most of which take place before Christmas, and most of which involve chocolate. Starting as soon as my sister and I get home (and we’ve been fortunate enough so far always to have lengthy Christmas vacations), we start baking Christmas goodies. Then we watch all our favorite Christmas movies whilst eating those goodies. (Our viewing list includes the mandatory Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, if we can convince my sister to sit through it, but it also includes some movies others might not even consider particularly Christmassy—like both installments of Home Alone—and some movies that most of the world has forgotten—like the Muppet’s Christmas Toy and the 1987 Muppet Family Christmas. Our favorite, however, is the Muppet Christmas Carol. We like Muppets. A lot.)

We decorate our tree with every single ornament we own, which results in each branch having two or more ornaments hanging on it, and my sister always puts the first gifts under the tree. Then my cat licks all the ribbons. We go to the Vigil Mass on Christmas Eve and then drive around the local neighborhoods looking at the Christmas lights. (When we were younger, we would literally say, “Ooh, aah” when we saw a good house, but we’ll still break out the phrase even now for an especially impressive display.)

On Christmas morning we open presents, and it usually takes half the day because my sister and I insist on unwrapping neatly so the paper can be reused—and we also usually get distracted by eating more Christmas goodies; it’s the only day out of the year when we eat chocolate before noon.

Every family has its own traditions, some probably much more exciting than ours, but this year we added something new: we read Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud to each other as we baked our Christmas treats (often interrupting the reading to interject quotations and musical numbers from the Muppet version), and when we finished that, we read Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. If you don’t feel Christmassy after those two books, I don’t know what can be done for you!

And we bookended our Christmas celebrations with birthdays. My sister’s birthday is just before Christmas and mine is just after, but since neither of us is ever home for the actual day anymore we’ve taken to celebrating a little late and a little early, respectively. So the first and last vacation goodies that we baked were birthday cakes! We used those tasty store-bought sugar letters to spell out an appropriate message on my sister’s, but when we got to mine we discovered we didn’t have a particularly good selection of letters leftover. So my sister, creative thing that she is, played Scrabble on my birthday cake. I was favorably impressed with the result and thought it was worthy of sharing.

So I guess in the end we actually drew out our holiday celebration much longer than most people do, since we were still celebrating until the 3rd of January! Perhaps that can become part of our family tradition starting next year: Christmas for as long as possible. Maybe we’ll even manage to make it to the Feast of the Epiphany and revive the celebration of the Twelfth Night. After all, Christmas Day isn’t the END of something—it’s the beginning of everything!