How to celebrate Christmas
To celebrate Christmas you need to forget that you have grown up and have become too old to believe in miracles, in life and in hope and happiness in general. To lose ourselves in the spirit of Christmas we need to somehow return to a time in our childhood, or anytime past, when life was simple and made more sense to find any real meaning, any message in our lives. So this Christmas let us keep everything straight and simple and pledge to celebrate the coming of the Lord with our friends and family. Here’s how.
A few forgotten traditions
- Send Christmas and New Year cards to all your friends and family and buy gifts for your near and dear ones to give them on Christmas day.
- Decorate a Christmas tree with traditional ornaments a few days before Christmas and light it up with Christmas lights. It does not matter if the tree is natural or plastic, big or small as long as the whole family is involved in putting it up. Put gifts under the tree for everyone in the family.
- Spruce up your house for the big day and put lights in the front and the back yard. Hang an inviting Christmas wreath on your front door and a sprig of mistletoe in the doorway. This is an invitation for people to kiss each other, if caught standing under it.
- Make a traditional Christmas Eve dinner and leave cookies and milk for Santa when he comes visiting after midnight. Do not forget to leave some oatmeal cookies for the reindeer.
- Let the children give you a wish list to send to Santa. Hang up stockings at the end of their beds and fill them with goodies for them to find when they wake up in the morning.
- Attend Midnight Mass and the morning service, if you so feel like and come back to eat the sumptuous Christmas dinner of roast turkey, mashed potatoes, pork and Christmas pie.
Do’s
- Keep things simple and keep them fun.
Don’ts
- Don’t get into the mode of impressing people with your culinary expertise, your élan for organization or your perfectly decorated house.