Christmas Hoopla

My dear friend Kathy tagged me to write 12 random things about myself that revolve around Christmas. Hers were so cute and funny that I decided to go for it myself.
1. My Dad's side of the family has the tradition of everyone gathering for a soup dinner sometime around Christmas and after dinner we take turns reciting something we've memorized that has been meaningful in some way during the year. After each recitation, the person is allowed to choose one gift from the table (which we've filled by each bringing one gift). People sing, recite Scripture, recite poetry in other languages, recite their own poetry, and do dramatic readings. It is always quirky and fun.
2. Growing up, my sisters and I would each take a bag of candy from church at the end of the Christmas Eve service, take it home, dump it all out on the bed together and sort out the chocolate from the non-chocolate candy. The chocolate candy went into Mom's stocking, and the non-chocolate candy (mostly peanuts and peppermints) went into Dad's stocking. We've gotten a little more creative as we've gotten older, but we still prefer the brown bag stocking fillers :)
3. My Mom makes Christmas casserole for breakfast every year. She makes it on Christmas Eve, and bakes it Christmas morning and we all dig in while we open presents.
4. My family opens presents on Christmas morning in our pajamas, not much different than many families. But we have always been very careful that only one person is allowed to open a gift at a time (unless the gifts are the same).
5. Stockings are never hung on a mantle, we don't have a mantle. They are laid on top of the piano.
6. Amanda always walks over from next door around 10 am and she and I swap gifts on Christmas morning (this year she is in England...I don't think she'll be walking over).
7. Our church sings Silent Night on Christmas Eve, by candlelight, and at least once through in German.
8. Derek's family opens presents on Christmas Eve, and one year the neighbor boy across the street asked why they had opened all their presents already. Derek's dad told the kid that it was Christmas, and Santa must have missed his side of the street!
9. My first snowy white Christmas (in Shafter it is usually foggy white) was Christmas 2004, which was also my first Christmas away from home, and my sister Sarah came to stay with me and we made Christmas casserole to make it feel like home.
10. Putting the lights on the Christmas tree was always Dad's job. Making sure the lights worked before he put them on, was a job for us girls. We would sit and yank light bulbs out and try new ones for HOURS, so that we wouldn't have to drive all the way into town to buy a new set of lights.
11. I was always the first one to wake up on Christmas morning, and was usually unsuccessful in waking the rest of the house, so I would spend the first several hours of Christmas morning "inspecting the presents", making tunnels for the train around the tree out of gift boxes, and staring at the lights on the tree with the dog.
12. In my family someone always gets a movie for Christmas and we watch it as a family that afternoon as we clean up wrapping paper and continue eating casserole. The worst Christmas movie ever, was the year that I got "Babe, Pig in the City". There is a scene where a dog is dangling off a bridge by it's collar choking and it goes on and on and on. I ran out of the room crying. My Mom was shouting "Turn it off!" and Dad was shouting "Who has the remote?" and I never finished watching "Babe, Pig in the City".
And so I tag Jolene to complete her own list of Christmas Hoopla. I look forward to hearing it!