Holiday Traditions (A Guest Blog)

The following is a guest blog, courtesy of CelticBuffy over at Serving up Life... Being that it is Christmas Eve, I felt it a fairly appropo.

If anybody else wants to get in on the guesting action before the New Year, let me know!

There are very few traditions that my family follows for Christmas. We bounce around from year to year, depending upon work schedules, and whose turn it is to have the children. There is, however, one thing that remains constant in our family from year to year, whether we are all together or miles apart. What, you ask, is this prevailing tradition? It is our Christmas Vacation.

No, not that kind of vacation, although I certainly wish it was! :) I'm talking National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Hanging with the Griswold's. Enjoying the fact that someones Christmas is way more messed up than ours. Every year my sister(of the heart, in-law), my (second) parents, and my kids and I watch poor Clark try to pull together the ultimate family Christmas. More often than not we are all watching in our own homes, far apart from each other, but we always watch it. It is our one Christmas constant.

I recently realized how many Christmas movies there are that we like to watch during the month of December. So I decided to make a list of our top Christmas movies. In no particular order they are:

~Fred Claus

~Die Hard (because a little Bruce Willis always makes the holiday brighter)

~The Muppet Christmas Carol

~ Gremlins (I'm saving this until the kids get a little older)

~The Family Stone

~The Santa Clause ( and Santa Clause 2 and 3)

~The Nightmare Before Christmas

~Holiday Inn

~Elf

~Home Alone

~White Christmas

~Polar Express

~Scrooged

~Miracle on 24th Street (the original)

~A Christmas Story

~Bad Santas (on my need to see list)

Don't even get me started on the Christmas specials and cartoons that need to be watched to ensure maximum holiday spirit! Of course there is one notable film missing from this list. Jimmy Steward in "It's a Wonderful Life" is a great Christmas movie. Unfortunately during the holiday season of 1985 (I think) my cousin, uncle, and I made it our mission to watch it every single time it was on TV. Since my grandparents had a dish (no not DishNetwork, this was one of those freakily huge satellite dishes cemented into the yard since you couldn't get cable in the boonies those days) with oodles of channels I think me managed to watch that movie over 50 times in the two weeks of vacation. As you might imagine, I haven't been able to bring myself to watch it since then.

I leave you with the immortal words of Clark Griswold and hope you have a much more sane Christmas than he did!

"Where do you think you're going? Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no. We're all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here. We're gonna press on, and we're gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny f***ing Kaye. And when Santa squeezes his fat white a** down that chimney tonight, he's gonna find the jolliest bunch of a****les this side of the nuthouse."


Happy Holidays!