How do you celebrate Christmas?

[caffinatedloz]

Does your family have any special or unique traditions? Are there things that you do every year together? What do you enjoy doing around Christmas time?

My mother, sister and I always go on lots of walks or evening drives to look at all of the Christmas lights in our neighbourhood. We are lucky to live near heaps of houses where people put a lot of effort into decorating. I especially enjoy the walks and chats.

Around this time I also feel as though I am constantly baking. I make plates and plates of biscuits to give to everyone I know. I love to bake, but although I enjoy what I make, there's no way I could eat it all, so Christmas is the perfect time to do baking because there are heaps of people to give a gift to. I like making pfeffernüsse. They are the only Christmas biscuit I can make. I also make lots of choc-chip cookies with white chocolate and cranberries which are sort of festive.

My family goes to church at Christmas time, so we always go to a carols service in December as well as a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day service at our church. This is always really enjoyable. This year, the kids from our church are putting on a Christmas play on Christmas Eve and I am lucky enough to be helping with directing and costuming.

On Christmas Day (and occasionally boxing day) we always have lunch with my dad's family at someone's house. We see my mum's family in late December or early January and (if we're lucky like this year) spend some time at a beach house with them.

So, how do you celebrate?

[Geoo]

It depends year to year, but generally, we go cut down a real life Christmas tree (we didn't this year) and haul it home to decorate.

We then venture outside to put lights up around our house. My family do like to do night drives to go Christmas light hunting, but ever since we moved to a neighborhood that has a much older demographic, it is like every 1/2500 houses that have decorations up. So we don't do it as much anymore.
Our two main traditions, is to go shopping late at night at a shopping centre (like at 10.00 -12.00), and to always make a gingerbread house.

My mum and I like to go down and listen to the local christmas carols. Other than that, chirstmas day is just LOTS of driving to go visit relatives. I bake SO much. I bake biscuits, pavlovas, cakes, you name it. We don't really have much of a christmas lunch anymore, as there is just too much going on.

[Erutepa]

I don't think we do anything particularly unique in our family.

On the first weekend of Christmas we always buy a real tree (we don't go as far as cutting one down ourselves though) and decorate it. We spend that same weekend decorating the inside of the house and save for a door ornament or so we don't really decorate the outside of the house.
We do a bit of baking in our family, but not tonnes. So far we've baked a bit of gingerbread, but not much else. Might try to cook some snickerdoodles (the recipe of which poet gave to me) soon though.

In the week before Christmas my grandfather always comes down to spend a couple weeks with us. In these couple weeks there's alot of shopping and having barbecues and generally hanging around in the back yard much more than usual.

On Christmas day usually we host a family lunch where relatives come over, however this year everyone is off doing their own things so we won't be catching up unfortunately. We did have a bit of a catch up earlier this month to make up for such.

And all the while there is of course and most importantly the overeating of fruit mince pies and chocolates.