Christmas Traditions

Ok, I promised to tell you some of my families Christmas traditions.  As I think of, which ones I want to post, I have to tell you that I have sat here and just laughed, until I have cried.  It has brought back a lot of funny memories. 

One of my favorite, when I was younger, traditions was seeing how early we could wake up on Christmas morning.  It was a competition we had going on, with our neighbors.  To see who could get up before the other one.  The last that I remember, we were getting up at 4:30 in the morning.  Shoot, by the time, others were getting up to open presents, we were going to bed for a nap.  My husband, couldn't believe we were getting up that early to open presents.  That is one tradition that I am so glad we dont' do anymore. 

One of my dad's traditions, was hiding my mom's presents.  He would hid them at one of our neighbor's houses.  She would usually go through the morning, not knowing if she had a present or not.  Or he would send her on a scavenger hunt.  Another thing he would do would be to wrap a hugh box, of course with no name on it, and then there would be about 5 to 10 boxes on the inside - all wrapped within one another. And the last small one, would have a note it in of where her present could be found.  We never knew from year to year what he had up his sleeve.  He loved playing jokes on us.

One of my favorite traditions, as a kid, we trying to find out what we got as presents.  My sister and I would find ways to peek and we were really good at it.  Mom never knew we had been into the packages.  We would slice the tape on the presents and take it out or if we tore the paper we would just re-wrap the present.  My mom never knew that we had re-wrapped them.  One time, I need to borrow the car, (I didn't have my own car) and mom had presents in the trunk.  She told us "Girls don't look in the trunk".  Now, what do you think the first thing we did?  We not only looked in the trunk we took everything out and checked them all out, one by one.

My mom was a night owl, and she still is today.  Well, my sister and I couldn't wait until she went to bed to see what we had gotten from Santa. So, we snuck up to the living room, crawling on our hands and knees, and got some of the board games that we had gotten.  We took them back to our rooms and played.  As we were sneaking back up to the living room to put them back, we got to giggling and got caught.  She didnt' know that we were putting them back - she thought we had just come up there.  We finally told her a couple of years ago. 

One more tradition that I would love to share with you, involves my grandparents.  My grandparents would take my sisters, myself, and my cousins to look at Christmas lights.  We would go downtown Chattanooga to look in the windows.  Back then, the business would decorate their windows with different Christmas scenes.  They were great and they are getting back to this today.  Then we would go and eat supper at Krystal's that was downtown.  We would sing Christmas songs and have such a good time.  This was something that I always looked forward to and is something that I miss today. 

Needless to say, since I was so sneaky as a kid, I make sure that my kids can't find presents or open them after they have been wrapped.  At least, I think they haven't done that ...  I guess I will find out when they are adults and start spilling the beans. 

What are some of your family traditions?  Did you do anything funny as kids?