If there’s one thing I value above all else during the holiday season, it’s tradition. My family has always celebrated Christmas, and I still do, though I’ve long since grown out of the religious trappings. Even though my brother and I have long since moved away from home, it matters not: we return to our parents’ house and crash there on Christmas Eve to enjoy the holiday as a family. (It sure beats facing traffic on Christmas morning, now doesn’t it?)

All of the expected stuff is present and accounted for: the Christmas tree, stockings, house lights, gifts, and a big meal to cap it all off. Aside from the generic celebratory pieces, I’ve also got some Christmas traditions that not everyone observes. Some might be fairly unique, at least to the best of my knowledge. Read on…

• Christmas specials and films. Once December rolls around, I’ve got my triple threat of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I own them all on DVD or Blu-ray Disc, since the television broadcasts edit the shit out of them. (That, and I ditched cable almost two years ago.) I’ve been watching those three each and every year with family or friends since as far back as I can remember, and starting last year, I unearthed A Garfield Christmas to add to the mix. For holiday films, I really only watch two on a regular basis: A Christmas Story and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. As with the specials, I know there’s plenty more great ones out there, but I’ve got to stick with my favorites.
  • Quick sidenote concerning A Christmas Story: my girlfriend and I have created our own tradition surrounding the film, since it’s one of our favorite movies. We hunt down some unique gourmet hot chocolate, and drink it while viewing the flick, often accompanied by some other holiday-themed dessert. (Yes, that includes fuuuuuuuuuudge.)
• Annual ornament. Every year, I buy a new dorky ornament for my folks’ tree, and it’s often one of Hallmark’s offerings. Plain glass bulbs and the like bore me, so I feel the need to spice things up a bit with ridiculous crap like Star Trek ornaments and talking Muppets. C’mon, who wouldn’t want Statler, Waldorf, or the shuttlecraft Galileo on their tree? Especially since the Borg Cube routinely scares the shit out of my mother when she turns on the tree lights. Resistance is futile.
• Cookie decoration. This one goes way back. Since I was very little, my mother would make a batch of basic round sugar cookies on Christmas Eve, and my brother and I would coat them with frosting, icing pens, candies, et cetera. Now we’re fully grown men…and we still decorate the damned cookies. How could we not? Cookies are delicious, damn it, and you really can’t outgrow them. They’re always a hit when we bring them over relatives’ houses the next day, at least. We also construct a giant stacked cookie heavily laden with frosting and icing, which we’ve dubbed “the Conan Cookie.” We then try to convince each other to eat the monstrosity, because we’re stupid.
• Board Game Eve. No, that’s not the name of some esoteric stripper. You people are sick! On Christmas Eve, my family plays a board game or two. After my folks hit the hay, my brother and I keep playing until at least midnight. We try to vary it up every year, from common offerings like Scrabble and dominoes to more unique fare like Architekton and Fluxx. Either way, grumbling and swearing competes with Christmas spirit.
• Wolferman’s English muffins. The baked goods from Wolferman’s aren’t cheap, but holy shit, are they worth every last damned penny. Their massive English muffins in particular are a tasty staple of our Christmas morning breakfast. In fact, they pretty much are breakfast; the scrambled eggs and whatnot are just accessories.

That’s a decent bunch, but there used to be even more. Here’s a few traditions from times past that have faded away as my brother and I grew up.

• Voice recording. When we were kids, my father would always break out the tape recorder on Christmas Eve and ask us about our wishlists. He’d then read us a Christmas book, and it was off to bed with us. The next morning, everyone opening their gifts was also recorded. I guess it was cute at the time, but those old tapes are rather painful to listen to in retrospect.

• The long walk. As you know, children find it impossible to sleep on Christmas Eve. My folks went for the direct approach to solve this problem: they marched us around town until we were ready to drop. That’s how it felt at the time, anyway; we really were just going for a walk that lasted a mile or two, with a hot chocolate bribe halfway through. It was annoying at the time, but I can’t fault my parents’ logic: it worked!
  • My brother and I still go for a walk on Christmas Eve, but for different reasons. We don’t get to hang out that often, plus it’s always good to get out of the house for a bit if it’s not too cold outside. (And it’s still a good excuse to nab a hot chocolate or coffee.)
• The light drive. Once or twice in December, my father would pack us all into the car and drive us around town to look at other people’s Christmas lights. Most folks had fairly basic displays, from a lone tree with lights in the front yard to the electric candles in the windows. A few random folks went all-out; there’s two houses in particular that to this day still set up massive Christmas villages on their front lawns. Bear in mind, these are tastefully done, high-quality villages, not the tacky overload that’s so common nowadays. There was none of that inflatable crap back then!
• Christmas lists in the Noel mailbox. Most kids wrote wishlists or letters to Santa, and my brother and I were no different. We usually stored them in this mailbox ornament on our tree; it was one of those homemade deals that were knitted on a plastic frame, with giant “Noel” text on the side. The idea was that the lists would magically transport themselves to the North Pole (read: our folks nabbed them when we weren’t looking). Laugh all you want, but if we believed in Santa Claus, then how was that any more ridiculous? Anyway, our days of writing letters to the big man in red are long gone, as is our sneaking downstairs late at night to try to snare Santa in a Calvin-style trap…but that Noel mailbox ornament still hangs on the tree.
• Christmas Eve Christmas. As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, my mother’s a nurse. Hospitals don’t close, and back in the 1980s, she had to work a lot of second shifts and holidays. For a while, this meant that every other year she had to work Christmas Day. That blows. But spending Christmas together as a family was paramount, so my folks had an ace up their sleeve. The first time this happened, my brother and I woke up on December 24th…only to find a pile of gifts under the tree, and a letter from Santa. The letter explained that my mother had to work the next day, so Santa felt that we should all get our gifts early to spend the time together. We were thrilled to get our gifts a day early, and my folks got to sleep in since us kids were clueless. Clever ploy, huh?

There you have it. Even if you don’t give a rat’s ass, I still had to write all of this stuff down for posterity’s sake. You know how crappy my memory is, and yes, that extends to stuff I celebrate every year.

Got any notable traditions of your own? If you celebrate winter holidays other than Christmas, those still count, so make your voice heard.

Did you know that my mother’s detective skills rival those of the goddamned Batman?

No, this post will not contain a crudely Photoshopped image of Mom wearing Batman’s cowl.

I’m not exaggerating. While many of my peers tell tales of how they cleverly pulled the wool over their parents’ eyes as kids, or otherwise accomplished feats that would surely earn them a beating if they ever got caught, my brother and I couldn’t get away with shit in our family. My father did his due diligence as the patriarchal authority figure, but when it came to discovering that seemingly meaningless minutiae were out of my place, my mother saw right through our bullshit schemes.

Part of it may be due to her lifetime career as a nurse. (Which threw the old “I’m too sick to go to school” trick right out the window.) Anyone who works in a medical profession needs to pay attention to detail, and nurses are right up there with doctors in that regard. This experience coupled with the natural superpowers women seem to gain after they have children made for a formidable obstacle, indeed.

I know that kids are a superstitious and cowardly lot, but cripes, some of our mother’s perceptions were borderline paranormal. Even if my brother and I skillfully extracted a cookie or two from the back side of the cookie jar, disturbing none of the rest, our mother noticed without even looking. Cripes, if she was on NCIS or CSI, the show would be over in thirty seconds.

My brother loves to rag on our mother for this stuff. When he drops by for a visit, he’ll often shift the bathroom scale or a picture frame a fraction of an inch…and our mother notices every single time. My brother has even done hilarious impressions of Christian Bale’s Batman saying some of Mom’s phrases. Comedy gold! (She doesn’t find it nearly as funny as we do.)

I suppose it’s entirely possible that Mom goes out and fights crime all night. But with her decades of medical experience, I’m hesitant to ask.

Most people tend to save their important mementos by cluttering up their shelves or other living spaces, or they sadly trash them.

I take a slightly different approach: I store my nostalgia items in what I lamely call “memory boxes.” I guess you could also call them time capsules: the first one covers my childhood up through eighth grade, the second box covers high school, and the third covers college. (I’ve been thinking about a fourth that would cover the first decade post-college, but I’m not sure if I’ll go through with it yet.) Right now, they’re all large cardboard packing boxes, but I plan to replace them with more durable plastic crates in the future.

All manner of objects can be found inside, from toys to books to articles of clothing. The name of these containers describes their function quite accurately, as aside from storage, they help me remember things from decades past. For example, the childhood and high school boxes contain yearbooks that help fill in the gaps when it comes to my school years. The college one has all of my old sketchbooks.

Once in a great while, I’ll open one up and sift through the contents within. Especially in the case of the childhood and high school boxes, there were objects in there I’d completely forgotten about. Granted, many of the associated memories are not pleasant (especially in the case of the yearbooks), but they still helped define who I am.

I have destroyed some nostalgic items in the past, due to either space concerns or those bad memories, and I’ve later regretted it. Much of that stuff is irreplaceable, but in the case of books or other mass-produced items, I’ve sometimes bought new copies to put back in the box. It may not be the exact copy I had way back when, but it’s close enough.

I’ve recently begun shifting more of my books and a few duplicate comics into the memory boxes; I’ve either reread them recently, or don’t plan to again for many years, if at all. Still, I maintain a sentimental attachment to them, so I’m not going to throw them out. It also helps to consolidate a lot of my old crap.

It’ll be more interesting to go through this stuff when I’m in my eighties…assuming that I can still remember where I put them.

In case you didn’t know, I don’t consume alcoholic beverages. At all. The hardest “liquor” I’ll touch is something like Nyquil, and even that’s very rare. (Because that shit’s just nasty.)

In modern times, my stance is not much of a big deal. All of my friends and family members are aware of it, and it doesn’t bother them to the best of my knowledge. When I accompany people to bars or other venues where the booze flows freely, I just don’t partake, and nobody thinks poorly of me save for the occasional stuck-up bartender. (For that miserable performance, you shall receive no tip.)

However, things were very different in the past. In college, I was constantly shit on for not drinking. Sometimes the derision was passive aggressive, but other times it was blatant. Many people actually stopped hanging out with me because I don’t drink, falsely claiming that I looked down on people who did. What nonsense.

The only time I’d intervene in someone’s drinking was when it was causing a serious health problem. Anyone who’s been to college knows that happens far too often, and I did my best to help people get back on their feet and not ruin their damned lives. What was my reward? Resentment. Yes, I actually got bitched out on occasion for making sure friends didn’t wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, or worse.

One of my friends in college even told me that I’d be fucked over in the real world for not drinking; it was an “essential function of business,” so he said. What the hell is this, Mad Men? Fortunately, I have yet to encounter any career-based resistance whatsoever.

At least no one ever gave me shit because I don’t smoke. (Well, the potheads did, but that should come as no surprise.)