Start of the season...when 101.9 (Baltimore) and 97.1 (Washington) start their all-Christmas music around the middle of November...I never tire of Christmas music and love every minute of it! I just wish they played it until January 6...or at least through New Years Day! If we're home for Thanksgiving, we usually put up our outside decorations - lights, wreaths, garland. Sometime b/w Thanksgiving and December 6, we start decorating the inside - starting with our fireplace mantle. December 5/6 is "St. Nicholas Day", the children hang their stockings the night of Dec 5 with a letter to Santa. Santa stops by that night to pick up the letter and leave a small gift along with some fruit & candy to "tide them over" until Christmas. A week or so before Christmas, we all go out to cut our tree. We like to keep our tree up until well into January, so getting it little later means it lasts longer. (The tree in January helps lighten the drab days of post-Christmas winter.) On Christmas Eve, if our church has a service, we attend the service and then have my brother and his girl friend & her son over that evening. That night my DH and I wrap presents...well, I do most of them. I actually enjoy wrapping gifts, my DH not so much! We'll have a fire, watch "The Christmas Story" until my DH bails & goes to bed, and then I listen to Christmas music! I then "artfully" arrange the gifts under the tree and fill the stockings (more fruit & candy), turn off all the lights except the tree, and gaze at if for a while (I love it!) Christmas Day, is a quiet day spent at home...lounging around in our PJs most of the day! Back when our DS & DD still believed, they would be up at dawn. Once they were older, we had a rule that they could not wake us until 9am. They were free to check out their stockings, but they couldn't open gifts. Now that they no longer believe...well it's the same rule...not before 9am! We unwrap gifts and then I make blueberry muffins. That night, we have lasagna for dinner. The next day, we pack up and that night head north (western NY) to visit my mom and one of my sisters and other brother until around New Years Day. We decided when we had kids that we would always spend Christmas Eve & Day at home...no traveling until after Christmas! We wanted to spend it in our home with our kids. It's worked out very well. Christmas Day ends up being very relaxed!

I was a long haul trucker for years and travelled throughout the U.S. On a trip in 2003, from Atlanta, GA to Washington, DC, I was scheduled for an early Monday delivery to one of the grocery warehouses. I stopped at a motel in Winchester, VA just off I-81 and went to sleep. I was dreaming a strange dream. I was on an airplane, sitting in first class and smoking a cigarette. Everybody was dressed like extras from a 70s T.V. show. I thought that was strange and I also thought it strange that I could smoke on an airplane. I pulled the airline ticket from my pocket and saw that I was on TWA Flight 514 from Columbus, OH to Washington, DC. It was dated December 1, 1974. Well, I thought, stop the presses-what's going on around here? So I rang the call bell for a stewardess. I told her I'd like to speak to someone from the flight crew because it's 2003, TWA is out of business, and I want to know what in the hell is going on here. She just smiled and said that the crew had began the descent into the Washigton area and could not be bothered by any one right now. So now she heads toward the cockpit door and opens it. I look through the door and all of the sudden see trees that are way too close. The pilot said something like, "get some power on" as the trees got bigger and bigger. I yelled and dove into the aisle. At that moment I woke up. Geez that was creepy. By now I had to leave the motel to go to DC. It was about 2:00 A.M. I get on Highway 7 heading east out of Winchester and around Berryville and on to the intersection of Highway 7 and State route 601 near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. There was a closed gas station on the NE corner. I pulled in to check my map. As I'm sitting there, I swear, I see this guy in the parking lot walking towards me. Now its the middle of the night and as he came closer into the light of an overhead lamp I could see he is wearing what looks like an airline uniform. He walks up to my truck and asks if I could give him a lift to Dulles International Airport. I asked what he was doing out here. He just says, "please take me to the airport, I fly for TWA and have to work a flight this morning". Against my better judgement, I tell him to go around to the passenger side and that I'd take him to the next open place so he could call a cab. So he walks around the front of the truck and just disappears in the headlights. Now I'm totally freaked out and figure its time to put on my boogie shoes. When I got home I decided to research TWA and this whole area of Northern Virginia. I was totally stunned to learn that on December 1, 1974 a TWA Flight 514 crashed into Mount Weather in Virginia about a mile from the intersection where I saw the pilot. All 92 people aboard the Boeing 727 from Columbus, OH were killed when the flight crew initiated a premature descent for Dulles International Airport. The aircraft was virtually vaporized when it hit the mountain. To this day, I've never had any experience...

Christmas has always been very traditional for me, but has evolved over the years. As a child, my siblings and I would get up VERY early to see what Santa had brought. Oddly enough, my son always slept in on Christmas morning, probably because he didn't have siblings to egg him on. My wife and I would sit and drink coffee and wait and wait for him to finally get up. I would always read the Christmas story from The Bible before any gifts were open in an attempt to keep it all in perspective. We usually buy a cut tree a couple weeks before Christmas, and put it up and decorate it 1-2 weeks before Christmas. Our first year in the new house, we bought a balled-and-burlapped Norway Spruce, enjoyed it inside for about a week, and then planted it out front. It is doing well, and gets lights on it for the holiday season. Hopefully, we'll always have that tree to remember our first Christmas in this house. On Christmas Eve, we have various finger foods, such as shrimp, Swedish meatballs, homemade bread and other goodies to eat before and after church. After church, we have wine or 'adult' eggnog while listening to Christmas music. Alton Brown has an amazing eggnog recipe that you make and age in the fridge- for a month or more! It has enough booze in it that it certainly won't spoil. On Christmas Day, we start with stockings- huge ones that my late mother knitted for us over 30 years ago. Stockings have always been a thing with us, with each trying to outdo the others with funny or odd things in them. Main presents are then opened, with breakfast happening somewhere amongst all of the other activities. Breakfast is usually a casserole assembled the night before, plus Swedish coffee cake and whatever homemade breads are still around. In recent years we've started a new tradition of having some friends over for Christmas dinner- usually a beef roast and all of the fixin's. My wife works in a hospital, so generally works every third Christmas. We've always found a way to work around it, though. She's working this Christmas- the LAST one, as she's retiring in August. Our friends will come over on Saturday instead. Our little spruce after an early snow this year- And yours truly, getting silly in our little Miata-

I just recently found out about Jolebokaflod too, and now I see references to it all over the place. I love it when that happens. Thank you for the link Vee. I shared this with my sister who just loved the whole thing. In our (small) family we'd be the only ones participating. Her DH and kids aren't big readers, my DH reads mostly research type information on the computer and our cats don't read at all. In my household I'd be the only one participating. Well, there's nothing wrong with that - maybe I'll do it anyway. Plenty of choices on my TBR shelves. (I could ask DH to pick some out at random so I'd be surprised) I might be able to find one for my sister too, although our reading tastes rarely overlap. Sadly, other traditions we kept in the past have dwindled in the face of a shrinking family and other perfectly normal factors. When we opted out of gift giving altogether a few years ago I had planned to add some new traditions of my own but really haven't done so. One that I tried to introduce was having Shepard's pie on Christmas Eve. I thought I was being quite clever but it never really stuck.I'm enjoying this thread and it's giving me some food for thought, so thank you all.