Vee, we celebrate the New Year, but frequently refer to it as New Year's Day, with dropped apostrophes I'm sure.

Christmas Eve is usually a half-day holiday for business, but most businesses don't close down for the week between Christmas and New Year's. Some exceptions. Westinghouse closes down and makes everyone take vacation days. Schools do a 2 week holiday. Many people do take off for the week.

Tree-trimming parties start the weekend after Thanksgiving (4th Thursday in November.)

Four generations of family on my Mother's side (usually around a hundred show up from all over the States) get together for a big Christmas party a Saturday or so before Christmas. All the little kids get a goody bag; everyone gets a Christmas Tree ornament celebrating the family. (One year I had ornaments made with our grandparents wedding picture on it.) Anyone who got married or graduated in the time since the summer family reunion gets a quilt made by my mom and her sisters (with an uncle who does all the long arm quilting.) We raffle off another quilt to help pay for the celebration. So for adults, this is a holiday for eating and not getting, but giving, gifts. My mom and her sibs get together for a separate Christmas Dinner where they exchange gifts.

My dad's side of the family gets together for dinner a few days before Christmas with no gift exchange.
Mom will host all her offspring Christmas Eve for dinner and gifts. Christmas Morning is set aside for families at home with small kids. Christmas afternoon is an open house at Mom's for friends and family.

I have an annual dinner tonight I've been doing with friends for 15 or 20 years and we do a Yankee gift exchange.

And tomorrow I will drive over 500 miles to get to the family home for Christmas.

For Christmas at my house, we have a big late breakfast, usually on Christmas Eve or when everyone is off from work, for my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson, and my husband's two daughters, one SIL, two granddaughters, one GSIL, and baby on the way, and two grandsons. We've been married 24 years and have one granddaughter six months older than our marriage, which seems unusual. We eat, open gifts and visit awhile, and then everyone can go on to all their other festivities and responsibilities. It works well in that it doesn't interfere with Santa.

Then my husband and I, along with daughter and family, go to my sister's house in the country near our home place to spend Christmas Eve night and Christmas Day. She has a huge log house with a play room over the garage where she sets up beds and sleeping bags, so she has lots of room for all of us to stay since our mother passed away in 2000. I have one sister and two brothers. All together there are 26 of us with me being the oldest and my niece's five-month-old son the youngest. My grandson and two of my sister's grandchildren were born the same year, and the Christmas the three of them were two years old was pretty wild. Every time you turned around, one of them was under the tree ripping packages open.

On Christmas Day we have breakfast, gifts and stockings all around, and dinner around noon for those of my dad's family who remain. There are only an aunt by marriage and an uncle by marriage left, but numerous cousins and their offspring come. It's a big day and, of course, has become bigger with the expanding family. It is a carry over from my grandmother's time when there were not very many children, but it's a tradition we hate to end and is the only time we see some of our relations except for weddings and funerals. This year, with Christmas falling on Sunday, we have to work church in there and have delayed the dinner to 1:30. Kentucky is divided by the Eastern and Central time zones, so 1:30 down home is 2:30 for us Louisville people.

Lest you feel sorry for my sister--she loves having everyone and even likes to cook. She does the turkey and dressing and hot vegetables, and everyone else brings salads and desserts. Well, she makes lots of other stuff, too; I suppose just in case there should be a shortage. That's a joke. We all eat ourselves into a stupor. I ordered from a catalog an apron for her stocking that says, "Life is too short to cook for you people." Sure hope she doesn't get mad and quit.

Merry Christmas to all of you, my cyber friends, at RP.

Christmas for us is very family oriented although it will be quiet this year. Christmas Eve is church and sandwiches after..the day was always my parents over early for donuts and coffee and gifts when the girls were young. Now we will celebrate Christmas Day twice as my elder daughter is coming from San Diego on the 26th. Our younger daughter just turned 22 this week so the emphasis this year is not on gifts at all. We will have dinner on the 25th and again with our few presents on the 27th. It will be my husband and daughter(s) parents and mother-in-law. Our immediate family is small. My DH's sister and husband came from Novia Scotia for Thanksgiving. Believe it or not our traditional dinner for many years has been spaghetti-homemade sauce with meatballs and sausage, of course. We like to eat, but what we want and its usually easy. I don't think many businesses close. It depends where you live and when the holiday falls, but this year our school goes through the 23rd and reopens on Jan 3. Most businesses may give either the 23rd or the 2nd off but not both unless you are very lucky. I do any shopping that I do at all locally or on the internet. I refuse to enter a mall between Thanksgiving and Christmas. By the way, the day after Thanksgiving here is called "Black Friday". I hate all the commercialism. I noticed this year some decorations up before Halloween-ridiculous! When we were young and not far flung and my grandparents were living my dad's family got together Christmas night but now everyone is all over. We try to meet at my aunt's every summer or two.

Christmas here in Australia is mostly a family affair. My in laws always have a roast turkey (a fairly new tradition in Oz, it used to be chicken and roast pork) with vegetables. They eat dinner fairly early and then have presents, but it is not very exciting.
My family are more variable in what they eat (seafood this year) and present giving is more of an event, with many little presents for each person, and we sit and watch each one opened and commented on.

At home in the morning we have presents first thing in the morning (the hour getting later as the boys grow up) and then an ordinary breakfast before getting ready for going out for lunch and tea (dinner/evening meal).
We are not religious so we don't go to church.

Most Australians have a hot meal for Christmas lunch no matter what the temperature, although most people have airconditioning these days, so it isn't so important.

As for holidays, Christmas Day is a universal holiday, except for people like nurses and police officers etc, and here in South Australia we didn't used to have Boxing Day, as December 28th is Proclamation Day, celebrating the foundation of our state. Recently however, the government has declared that Proc Day will be celebrated on 26th Dec to put us into line with the eastern states (something we seem to always be doing!!). This year, 26th and 27th are public hols and shops reopen on Wednesday 28th. New Year's Day is always a holiday too, so we will have the Monday off in lieu. May businesses that are not retail will close between Christmas and New Year, and sometimes for some days afterwards as well.

Our schools are only closed from Dec. 23rd (half-day) through the 2nd-and often we go back on the 2nd, but I suspect that because the college football bowl games have all been pushed off January 1st to the 2nd by the NFL, we have off until the 3rd-my son was going to claim his mental-health day that day if they did have school, so he's glad not to have to burn it so soon in the year.

cece, or anyone. Can you explain 'mental-health' day please? Monty Pythonesque images are going round in my head.

Vee: It is when you decide to "call in sick". You must falsely sound like you're on your deathbed, tell your boss you're sick, and then go skiing, for example. You justify it by saying that it is needed for your "mental health." Then you can go to work the next day in bubbling good health claiming a rapid recovery, unless, of course, you have broken a leg skiing and really need a sick day. Now that one could be a little difficult to explain.

Thank you Janalyn now all is clear. We call is 'pulling a sickie' an expression that must have been borrowed from our friends in Aus.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pulling a Sickie

I allow my children one "mental health day" a school year-and it may not be on a test or term-paper-due day.

I, too, allow my elementary age children the occasional "mental health" day but don't let them know I know they aren't sick... it means I give in now and then when they yell, from their beds, "I can't get up for school, my stomach hurts" when I know full well they are fine. On the other hand, since this is the first year I am back in the work force since having children, I told them they are only allowed to be sick on Tues and Thurs when I am not working. Daughter looked shocked, said it wasn't fair!

Getting back to the original post, one of my fondest Christmas memories growing up in NY was my mother giving me a "mental health" day (we didn't call it that) so my grandmother could take me to the Christmas spectacular at Radio City Music Hall and then out to lunch in the city. My family was very education-oriented so skipping school was a Really Big Deal.

We do family stuff on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, mostly because both my family and my inlaws are close by, but a few years ago we stopped splitting the day-it was way too much "eat, open your gifts, aren't they nice, say thank you, get in the car, don't quarrel back there, get out of the car, repeat" all day. As my mother's birthday is on Chrismas Eve, it is a natural to see them on that day. New Year's Eve is for couples and friends, New Year's Day is pork, sauerkraut and football.

Cece, don't you eat black eyed peas and cabbage on New Year's Day? What do you do for luck and money?

Carolyn, I picked up on the black-eyed peas from my South Carolinian sister-in-law, but we prefer them in Hoppin' John more than just straight. Also, the cabbage...we roll a big one in over the front threshhold, through the house, and out the back door (I can't recall where I learned to do that); then the cabbage is turned into coleslaw or sauerkraut. Superstitious as some people are that I know, on New Year's Day I make my DH or sons call relatives and friends on the telephone before I take over -- that's all about the first call of the New Year needing to be from a male...a call from a female is bad luck. (Jeez, where did that get started?) Our family traditions are a conglomeration of all kinds of things introduced to me in far-flung places. We have to have tamales with salsa and Longevity noodles to go with our Hoppin' John and slaw or sauerkraut. GOOD GRIEF! I'll cut this short since I can't paragraph.

pork and sauerkraut IS for luck and money-if you're in Pennsylvania Dutch country or come from German stock-which both my husband and I do partly. I make my children bury a little bit of the sauerkraut in a forkful of mashies. I add applesauce. I never heard the telephone superstition, but I do know in England that the upper-class used to have the footman with dark hair be the first one over the threshold for a similar superstition-

New Year's for our family is also pork/sauerkraut and mashed potatoes. That's by my insistence, having grown up in central PA in a heavily German region. My Polish side also wants the sauerkraut for good luck, along with eating a raw clove of garlic for same. I can't figure out why my Southern husband doesn't embrace these traditions, much less my children. Could it be the smell?

My DH's family (Irish side) insists on lentil soup (wealth) and herring in sour cream (health) as part of the New Year's meal, usually served along with baked ham and mashed potatoes -- can anyone shed some light on that tradition?

Italians also eat lentils at New Year's, preferably with cotechino (a type of sausage).

I have loved reading all these descriptions of your Festive season customs. Coming from something of a disfunctional family (although at the time I thought it quite normal) Christams day was often a time of tension and stress. Although we children enjoyed receiving presents etc my Father hated Christmas, my Mother had to do all the preparation, gift buying/wrapping on her own and by the time dinner was on the table there was usually an undercurrent of resentment, especially if the gravy was too thin or the brussel sprouts not boiled to death (ie just turning pink). Now with my own bunch we try and keep things more up-beat, although we don't have an extended family to keep in touch with. . . . . . . .As for New Years Day jollifications. Many people go to parties and pubs stay open for hours longer than usual. I don't think we English have any traditions of cabbage rolling, or meals of lentils or herrings in garlic served by our dark good-looking footmen (we always give our servants the night off). It is to Scotland you have to look for Hogmanay customs, as New Year there has always been more important than Christmas.

Here is a link that might be useful: First Footings