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I’m so excited for the holiday. I have a couple days of work left and lots of errands and then it’s lots of rest and relaxation and food! Christmas is my favorite holiday, mainly because of how we used to celebrate it when I was a kid.

Every Christmas Eve we would go to our favorite Chinese restaurant and have dinner. It was the only one we ever went to and we knew the family really well. The whole family, all my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandma, grandpa, great aunt, everyone would go and we’d have dinner. Then after dinner we would go to my grandma’s house and I remember going as fast as I could to light all the luminaries on the sidewalk before the rest of the family got there. They were just red and green paper bags with star cut outs on them and a tea light inside, but it was so important to me that the path to the house was lit for everyone. I loved watching the candle light reflecting on the snow. It all seemed so cozy.

Then we would go to the basement, where there was a huge tree and everyone would spread out and open presents and talk and eat more snacks. At 11:30 people would start to go home and me, my mom, grandma, and great aunt would go to Midnight Mass. When I was a bit older I was the cantor at the Midnight Mass, and it was one of my absolute favorite nights of the year. I loved singing O Holy Night, up in the choir loft, looking out at the alter and all the candles glowing throughout the church. It was just beautiful.

After Mass we would go our separate ways and then on Christmas morning my grandma, grandpa, and great aunt would come over to our house for Christmas breakfast. My aunt was a seamstress and every year she’d make me a Christmas stocking that was cross-stitched with a different theme. I’d open gifts from my mom and then we’d get ready and go back to my grandma’s house for a huge Christmas dinner.

It was the only meal of the year that my mom liked to cook and it was, oddly enough, a recipe she’d made up herself. It was pretty amazing because my mom hates cooking and isn’t that great at it, and somehow came up with a really solid cornish gamehen recipe. We always had a minimum of about 14 people at Christmas dinner, sometimes up to 25. I loved it. I loved eating together. I loved sitting in the living room with my aunt and playing games. I loved sitting on the couch and closing my eyes and hearing everyone laughing in the next room. It was the same every year and I looked forward to it for months and every year was better than the last.

So now I try and make Christmas special in a different way. My mom really likes to keep traditions, but after my grandparents and great aunt died, it was too painful for me to keep those traditions. It felt so wrong without them there and in a weird way I was worried that by doing the same tradition without them it would make me forget what it was like with them. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. We’ve also moved away from my extended family and don’t really talk much anymore. Not because anything happened, just because we all live very different lives in different parts of the country and the real thread keeping us together was my grandparents so once they were gone we lost that connection.

Christmas now is wonderful in its own new way. Usually we host so on Christmas Eve Jason’s family and my mom come over. We do something simple like cook a frozen pizza or something that doesn’t require a lot of prep. Then Jason’s siblings usually stay over on Christmas Eve and we have a slow Christmas morning before we start cooking. We only do a gift exchange now and the best part are the games we play to “steal” gifts. It’s always so much fun and we record the games. Every Christmas is still better than the last, even though it’s so different than I remember.

This time of year can be hard, thinking about the people we’ve lost or the way things used to be. But I like to think about how I can keep trying to make the holiday a cozy, magical, relaxing experience for everyone, and a lot of it is just being together in the same room with good food and fun people.

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