Good Fun Old Fashioned Family Christmas

I love Christmas.  I love traditions.  Every year, we have ham croissants for Christmas Eve dinner, bubble bread and egg casserole for Christmas breakfast, and turkey for Christmas dinner.  We go to mass on Christmas Eve and look at Christmas lights on the way home.  We open a few presents on Christmas Eve.  Stockings are opened after the presents. One of my favorite Christmas traditions is opening a pair of pajamas on Christmas Eve, wearing them to bed, and then having all the Christmas pictures in my new jammies!  I actually got really upset with my mom when she didn’t give me pajamas on Christmas Eve one year.  I mean just because I was 25 didn’t mean she could change things on me with no warning!  I love watching Christmas movies for the entire month of December.  Some of my favorites are Elf, The Grinch, and of course National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. 

As you can imagine, I was not super pumped about Christmas in a hotel with no decorations.  I didn’t want the Grinch called PCSing to steal the baby’s first Christmas!  I decided I would buy the baby’s first Christmas ornament, the yearly Christmas vacation ornament (a new tradition created by my sister!), and a set of new stockings.  The baby needed a stocking and of course it had to match!  (I am not sure what I will do when we have more children!!)  I hung out stockings with packing tape, because everyone travels with packing tape, right??  But there was nowhere to put the ornaments.  Our temporary home is on the third floor and I have a baby carrier and diaper bag at all times so I was not going to buy a big tree…or a real tree for that matter.  So I bought a 2 foot blue tree with lights on it from the Exchange.

This will not be a typical Christmas but at least we have our stockings hung and our little tree with four ornaments.  Two baby’s first Christmas ornaments, one Christmas vacation ornament, and one Harry Potter ornament I found while cleaning out my closest at my mom’s house. We are going to Midnight Mass.  It just happens to be at the Vatican.  (at least that is the plan…if the weather turns cold this might not happen because of the baby.)  We will have cinnamon rolls instead of Bubble bread and probably no egg casserole.  We will have turkey dinner, even though we only have one pyrex dish and three pans.  And we will open our stockings last.  Buon Natale!

Update-I was able to watch Christmas Vacation.  Matt and I looked in two different libraries, three different stores, two different movie rental places, and on the AFN TV schedule.  Guess where we found it-MEDICAL!  Matt went to see a doctor about his cough (he has been sick since the week we left NC...three plus weeks!).  The doctor visit took an hour and a half.  SERIOUSLY???  But everything was okay because I was watching Christmas Vacation and getting ready for the holiday.