Just before my tenth Christmas, my parents announced that we would be celebrating it differently from then on. Rather than opening all of our gifts on Christmas Day, as we had in the past, we would observe the twelve days of Christmas instead and open one present every night. The twelve days lead up to Epiphany, the commemoration of the day when the three wise men visited the baby Jesus. January 6, Epiphany, would be our big celebration rather than Christmas.

Since my sisters and I were fairly young, we didn’t think much of this change. That is, not until Christmas Day arrived and we were only allowed to open one gift each. The injustice of it all came to a head when we got together with our friends later in the day to compare our hauls. “I only got to open one present,” I remember saying gloomily, feeling very sorry for myself. With typical 10-year-old sensitivity, my friends talked about how great it was to have all their gifts already and how awful it must be to only be allowed to open one present and have to drag the whole thing out for DAYS.

That’s how it started. But after that, having my friends ask each day, “What did you get today?” made me feel pretty smug about the whole situation. Maybe spreading the holiday cheer out wasn’t so bad after all. By the time Epiphany arrived, their presents were long forgotten while I was opening the rest of mine, including the BIG one from my parents, and their envy was clear.

Though at that age Christmas was pretty much all about gifts, looking back now I see a very different picture. We perfected our twelve day celebration, having a large buffet table every night with Christmas goodies we didn’t get any other time of the year, followed with a short devotion by candlelight. A musical family, we’d sing the Christmas hymns in four-part harmony and when the last of our voices had died out, we’d flip the lights back on and each open a present.

It was a time of year that we all came to genuinely look forward to, not because of the presents, but because of the traditions we created and the time we unquestioningly spent together as a family. Our gifts to each other weren’t big; my dad was in school and we didn’t have a lot of money, but unwrapping a favorite candy bar or a carefully chosen pack of pencils, or even the penny, feather and rock my little sister wrapped up, made me, even as a child, feel very blessed indeed. It was the perfect way to celebrate Christmas, to really understand and think about the meaning behind it instead of focusing on gifts.

I wish I could say that I had carried on that tradition, but I haven’t. I’m not sure why because I have nothing but good memories of a time when it was just our little family, my parents, my two sisters and me, and all the problems of the adult world hadn’t factored into our lives yet. Christmas was, in my opinion, easily a time in which our family was the closest, when we always spent thirteen nights with each other, no matter what else was going on.

I tell this story because I think there are people out there who are looking for something a little different from the Christmas season. Celebrating the twelve days of Christmas is a wonderful way to slow down and focus on the meaning, rather than rushing through it in one day with so much food and so many gifts that we lose track of why the holiday exists in the first place.

In fact, I may institute this tradition with my kids next Christmas. I want them to have the fond memories of family time that I have, not just of Christmas Day, but of the whole season and the significance behind it.

What are some of your family’s holiday traditions?

Tags: children, Christmas, family, Holidays, kids, parenting