SITMT Contest - Christmas Holidays

New Contest: Holiday memories and Holiday knitting. Contest starts today and will end on Friday, December 21st. All you have to do is write a blog post about the holidays. Include memories from when you were a child, Christmas knitting you are working on this year, and holiday traditions. 5 points for the post. If you include pictures, you will receive 1 point for each photo. Have fun!

I think that I will start by directing you here to see the Christmas knitting. Yes... Lots of socks, but then you all "get that", right?

Do you people really want to hear about my childhood Christmases? Are you SURE??? I guess that I'll have to admit that my memories of Christmas are not universally happy memories. I grew up approximately 20 miles away from both sets of grandparents. My grandparents could not have been more different. My Dad's parents were I suppose, middle class, and pious Baptists... Now I have nothing against Baptists, but that did mean that they were decidedly different from my Mom's parents. You see my mother is from a "mixed marriage"... No - I am not talking about racially mixed. My Grandma was raised as a Baptist, but horror of horrors, she had married a Roman Catholic!!! And my Mom's parents were decidedly working class.
At Christmastime, this often meant two separate visits, and sometimes two Christmas dinners. We always had to be on our best behviour at my paternal grandparents, while mayhem seemed to rule at my maternal grandparents. And then there was the temperature difference... I never ever remember eating a hot meal at my Dad's parents. It was always a sit down meal at the dining room table, with my Grandpa at the head of the table and my Grandma at the foot. I sat at my Grandpa's right since you need to have a woman to the right of the man at the head of the table and I'm left handed. It always made my cousin's jealous....
Dinner at my maternal grandparents was always decidedly less formal. My mother is the second oldest of five children. I have 3 cousins on my Dad's side, but there are 13 on my Mom's side. And my Mom's parents had a very small house... After at best a warm meal at my Dad's parents we would go up to my Mom's parents and take turns on the back porch to cool off. And dining? Well, that involved TV trays!
As for traditions, we had very few when I was a child. I always felt like this was something that I had missed. As we got older, I enjoyed making Christmas cookies with my sisters. We would hang sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies on the tree as ornaments. Gradually over the course of the season the tree would become barer and barer...
Our tradition now with our children is to go to the Christmas Eve service at our church, come home for a late supper and then off to bed after leaving Santa and the reindeer at bit of a snack (and a note of course). Christmas stockings always have Terry's Chocolate Oranges in the toes and a bag of chocolate money for prosperity in the year to come.