With holidays coming up we start to get overwhelmed with planning meals and celebrations, it is easy to get off track and forget that the most important thing about the holidays is spending time together. Many families have traditions that they follow to keep their families in sync during the holidays. Here are some of the traditions that our members here participate in during the holidays with their families.
Pre-Thanksgiving Meal Prep
Ever since I was a little girl, my sister and I would spend the night before thanksgiving at our grandparent’s house helping to prepare the big feast. We would start Wednesday morning by making sure the turkey was defrosted and pulling out the stale bread that grandma purchased several days in advance. We would sit around the table for a few hours carefully pulling the bread apart into perfect bite-sized pieces. After serval lofts of bread are shredded, we then placed the bread into the oven to dry it out for stuffing. The rest of the day was spent sorting canned goods into tin pans to make cooking easier the next day.
Once everyone else was home that evening it was time to prepare the Pies. I would make the Lemon Meringue pies on the stovetop while my younger sister worked on the kitchen island making the pumpkin pie with our grandfather bouncing back and forth between us making sure everything went perfectly. As my sister and I got older, our grandfather still insisted on helping just to make sure things went smoothly. I now have a son that helps and let’s just say that Auntie Rena has a lot of competition in the Pumpkin Pie businesses now.
The evening filled with laughter and delicious-smelling pies would end would preparing the centerpiece of the meal: the Turkey. While Grandpa and us girls were making pies, grandma was always there mixing the stuffing so that when all the baking was done, the turkey could be stuffed. Some of our best memories are from Thanksgiving night, and now I get to create similar memories with my son as we stay at GGPA’s house the night before Thanksgiving to prepare the meal.
Thanksgiving Day
One thing almost EVERYONE can agree on is that the best part about Thanksgiving, besides the food, is waking up in the morning to watch the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade! We like to go a step further that morning, my grandfather wakes up extra early Thanksgiving morning to pull the turkey out of the oven that has been cooking all night and bake fresh, homemade cinnamon rolls. There is nothing better in the world than sitting at the kitchen island eating hot cinnamon rolls as you watch the parade on the TV.
Once the Parade is over, grandpa retires to the living room to take a nap while us girls start to pull out the last of the decorations because it’s not Thanksgiving if you don’t forget to hang some of the decorations up until the day of. When grandpa wakes from his nap it is time to cook: green bean casserole, scalloped corn, canned yams, creamy mashed potatoes, fat people gravy (gravy made from the drippings of the turkey), dinner rolls, and cranberry sauce. You don’t come to grandpa’s house on Thanksgiving unless you are prepared to eat.
After we are so stuffed that we can no longer move, we clean up the table and crash in the living room watching the hallmark channel for about two hours. Once everyone has recovered from their food coma, we take a walk around the block to make room for dessert… PIES. Our family may not be good at everything, but we EXCEL at baking. Lemon Meringue Pies, Pumpkin Pies, Chocolate Pies, Pecan Pies, and Banana Pubbing are all up for grabs now.
We usually try to eat dinner around 2 pm so that we can have desserts around 5 pm so that the ladies who would like to go Black Friday Shopping can go get a few more hours of shut-eye before they head to town to get in line for the chaos.
Christmas Prep
Thanksgiving is officially over, and all things Christmas are now fair game! We start putting our trees up that evening, lights and decorations may not be up, but you can bet money that the tree itself is up before the weekend is over. We spend the next several weeks decorating the houses, baking cookies, binge-watching Christmas movies, and spending our weekends driving to see Christmas lights. As noted before, we love to bake so we usually are passing out homemade cookies and candy to friends and family leading up to Christmas because we don’t know how to make sweets in small quantities.
Christmas EVE
Similar to Thanksgiving, we gather at the grandparents’ house to prepare desserts for after Christmas Dinner, but my mother hosts Christmas Dinner so all we do is bring the baked goods and our presents. My all-time favorite Christmas Eve tradition that a lot of families do participate in is Matching PJs. We have always done this as a family, growing up my grandparents always got us matching PJs and when I had my son, I continued this tradition on with my little family so now each house does their own matching PJs. We wear our PJs to bed and then when we continue to wear them all day Christmas and change into fresh PJs when we go to bed Christmas night.
Christmas
Christmas morning, we all wake up and open presents at our individual homes then gather up everyone else’s gifts and head to my parent’s house. As we start arriving to their house, we place all the presents under the tree and start helping dad with the cooking. A few years ago, my mom started a new tradition of trying a different culture for Christmas Dinner to help us learn more about our heritage. The first year she did a German meal and created a traditional German Christmas meal. I have heard rumors from my sister that this year will be an Italian Christmas so I’m excited for that. After Christmas Dinner we gather around the table to play games, each year the games change depending on what everyone brings with them and if anyone got a game as a gift.
This year will be hard for my family, this will be our first holiday season without my grandmother, and she was the heart and soul of our family traditions. She taught us many things over the years but the one thing I will now teach my children every chance I get is that the food and presents don’t matter, it’s the traditions and spending time with family that we will treasure the most. Our traditions will change a little now, and it will be hard but we will make sure to keep doing them to our best ability to keep her spirit alive.
Megan Winkler
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