Rodgers Family Christmas Traditions

My friend Lisa wrote a wonderful blog a few weeks back about her Christmas traditions and considering the fact that I love Christmas so much I thought this was a wonderful idea. I think part of the reason I love Christmas is that I love tradition. Doing the same little fun things every year just makes me happy. I continue to insist that Christmas is a magical holiday even if certain people around me insist that it is overly commercialized and goes on for entirely too long. I don't care. I just choose to celebrate the way that makes me happy and ignore all the rest.

So without further ado here are the Rodgers Family Christmas Traditions and reasons why I love Christmas:

1. Presents
At this point in my life I care much less about receiving presents than wrapping them. In my family wrapping presents is kind of like creating works of art. This is all due to my dad who has truly raised the bar as to what makes a beautifully wrapped present. First off, it is an unstated rule that no two presents under our family tree can be wrapped in the same paper. This is entirely possible because of the fact that my dad has an enormous store of wrapping paper (we're talking about hundreds upon hundreds of rolls of paper here). Secondly, lining up the design of the wrapping with the box, creasing corners, and making a nice looking box are all essential. If you really want to go all out, special presents can be adorned with decorations such as flat ornaments superglued on (stars, bells, snowflakes, santas,etc), cutout Christmas cards (such as doves on a sold background) or ribbons and bows. I love the challenge every year of creating beautiful presents. Sometimes on Christmas day we don't even want to open presents because they just make the room look so beautiful!



2. Present Clues
So one unique thing my family does is write clues on all of our present tags. I'm not really sure where this tradition started, but I love it. It makes all of your presents like a puzzle. Plus thinking up clues is also fun. There is a challenge in finding an appropriate clue that doesn't completely give away what the gift is. The best clues have you completely flummoxed for weeks and then when you open the gift you're like Oh duh that was obvious!



3. Decorating the Tree/House
As a kid I always enjoyed helping to decorate the tree with ornaments and put up our decorations all around the house. We of course at this point have many boxes more ornaments then could ever fit on one tree, so my parents now have to pick out their favorites every year. Some of the ornaments that always have to go up include our 12 days of Christmas silver bells, my and Susannes baby ornaments, ornaments from my parents travels all around the world, snow flakes and stars we get every year from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection, beautiful blown glass ornaments, an angel made out of Mt. St. Helens Ash, ornaments from my Dad's mom, and a crepe paper wedding bell from my parents wedding (which was 5 days before Christmas some 30 something years ago). And of course plenty of cute Hallmark santas and animals.



4. Christmas Cooking/Eating/Baking
We always do a lot of cooking around Christmas but only have a few steadfast traditions. One is making homemade Orange Juliuses on Christmas Eve. This stems from the fact that we usually get boxes of wonderfully sweet oranges from Bakersfield from Shuperts orchard, just a few blocks from my grandma's house. There is nothing like homemade Orange Juliuses and no oranges that quite compare to Bakersfield oranges. We also have a longstanding tradition of making Christmas cookies every year... though we've been slipping in recent year. We had fantastic cookie cutter collection including a very detailed Santa and detailed angel that my Dad would decorate.

A more recent tradition when my sister and I are both home is to make Chicken Chimichangas. I think the recipe came from either Sunset or Bon Appetit from the 70's but its a great recipe. However its one of those recipes that none of us really want to make alone, so with 3 of us in the kitchen it usually works out well. It involves boiling chicken, making a tortilla dough, creating a chicken filling, wrapping and then frying. It's amazingly good and I'm sad I won't be doing it this year.

5. Extended Family Gatherings in Bakersfield
Every year when I was little, after our Christmas in Ridgecrest we would head over to my Grandmas in Bakersfield and meet up with my Mom's side of the family...my Aunt Debby, Uncle Mark, cousins Matt, Stacey and Danni, Uncle Earle and my Grandma Barrall. There were many great things about these gatherings, but the best was that sometime after Christmas we would all go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant called Yen Ching. I know this sounds like a weird family tradition, but I loved it. The restaurant would usually put us in its private back room, and we would get a huge spread of food, including dishes such as crispy duck and prawns that we wouldn't normally get any other time. I have very fond memories of those meals, and I'm very sad that Yen Ching closed a few years ago. It was probably the best Chinese food I've ever had. I'm also sad that as all of us cousins get older its pretty much impossible to all gather at my grandmas anymore. What with jobs, marriages, and children added to the mix, its hard to keep every tradition going.



6. Toys R Us
So this isn't so much of a tradition anymore, but when we were kids my Uncle Earle used to give all his nieces and nephews the best present ever. He would take us to Toys R Us give us a 10 or 20 dollar spending limit and let us pick out whatever we wanted as our Christmas present. As a kid this was truly the most awesome thing ever. Our other Toys R Us tradition was a little kids (6-10) our parents would take Susanne and I separately to Toys R Us to pick out presents for each other. This tradition one year resulted in us buying the exact same present for each other!( a bright pink stuffed my little pony with blue hair if you're curious). Fond memories.

7. Christmas Movies!
Then of course no Christmas is complete without watching Christmas movies. Some of my favorite Christmas movies are also probably some of the cheesiest worst movies every made, but I'm still attached to them from watching them as a kid. For example you have The Night They Saved Christmas. Set in the 80's this is about a family of kids who to save Santa Claus and North Pole City from being blown up by dynamite and oil drilling done in North Pole by their fathers oil company. My other favorites are National Lampoons Christmas Vacation, Miracle on 34th Street, All I Want for Christmas and The Gathering. It's hard to be unhappy after watching a Christmas Movie.

Anyway, I'm a little sad I won't be getting to do participate in most of these traditions this year, but I guess I can live with a one year hiatus. Matt and I will still going to try to make Christmas cookies and figure out some sort of interesting Christmas dinner. And then we get a great treat on Dec 27th of a visit from my friends Reed and Regina. So while it won't be a traditional Christmas, it should still be lots of fun.