Today’s #reverb11/#resound11 prompt comes from Jaemie over at #resound11:

This is the time of year when families are upholding decades old traditions and working to create new ones. It doesn’t matter what you celebrate (or don’t) … please share with us your December traditions: how they got started, why you continue them, and why they are special to you.

Over the years, we’ve had many traditions in our family during December.

Not many of them stick, only because they either end up costing a bunch of money, or they get kinda boring. Or for whatever reason, we just stop doing them.

Years and years ago, we’d have a family Christmas at our house, where most of the relatives would come and spend the day. I think that stopped when we left Jersey.

When we lived in Phoenix, we started going to the movies on Christmas, and then out to dinner at the local casino’s (whose name I can’t remember) super special expensive buffet. The line for the buffet would be about an hour to two hour wait, and then there was delicious food inside. It reminded me a lot of the buffets we’d go to when we lived in Vegas, only, it wasn’t. lol.

After we moved back to Indiana, we all kinda became broke, so there wasn’t much to do except spend time with each other, which is completely fine! On Christmas Eve, for the last few years, we’ve been going to Denny’s. Last year they had all you can eat french fries, which was awesome. On Christmas day, Mr. Fox and I would hang out at my parents’ house and we’d have some kind of Christmas dinner. After that, we’d watch movies we rented from the cable box, and have some alcohol. I know its a weird tradition, but we like it, so we keep doing it.

Also for the last three years, Mr. Fox and I have had our annual holiday party, where we’d invite a bunch of people, eat a bunch of food and watch corny Christmas movies, including National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. I am pretty sure I’ve watched that twice a year, for the last 10 or so. It never gets old, and I can pretty much quote it. Mr. Fox can quote it word for word, which annoys me when he recites it along with the movie. I started tweeting iconic quotes from the movie a couple years ago and I continue to do so, under the hashtag of #christmasvacationquotes. After just doing that search, I am pretty sure you can find the entire movie in sequential order, just on the basis of quotes.

Anyway, since we’re getting ready to move, we didn’t have our holiday party this year. Which is fine, honestly. We always end up having so much food leftover, and with needing to clean out the refrigerator soon, it would have been more of a hassle than it’s worth. However, we will be having our annual party next year, in our new home. In fact, I’ve already gone into party-planning mode. Sure, it’s a year away. But it’s better to be organized than scrambling to do things the day or two before.

So, yeah, those are our mixed up traditions. We aren’t a perfect family, but hopefully after life settles down a bit, we’ll make some more traditions.

reverb11 resound11 day eighteen traditions holidays december christmas vacation