The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

In my opinion, the most wonderful time of the year starts at Thanksgiving and reaches all the way through Christmas. Things changed a little bit since I've gone off to college, but a lot has remained the same.

Tradition starts the day before Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Preparation Day, on which we do most of out cooking and cleaning on that day. As of four years ago, it is tradition that I prepare the turkey. This often involves doing strange things with it to make my mom cringe. It started when I discovered that the liver has a fun consistency. Now in addition to playing with the liver, we investigate the kidneys and heart, wiggle the neck around, massage the turkey's skin, and tickle its armpits.

Thanksgiving Day itself probably has more traditions than any other day in the Gast house. I get up at 7:00 or 8:00 am to start the Thanksgiving puzzle. More people trickle out of bed as the morning goes on. By 9:00 when the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade starts, pretty much everyone is awake. My dad or Rachel starts making cinnamon rolls, and we watch the parade and work on the puzzle. After the parade, sometimes we leave the TV on to make fun of the dog show. Ronda usually arrives around noon to help us finish the cooking. I always take care of the green bean casserole, and usually forget to add seasonings unless my mom reminds me. Uncle Andy along with Abby and Theresa get there sometime in the early afternoon and bring with them cocktail shrimp to snack on alongside Ronda's famous chip dip. At 4:00 we start dinner. Around 4:30 Uncle Mike arrives and we subtly make fun of him until he leaves. Things die down over the evening as friends and relatives leave one-by-one. Once it's dark, the Christmas lights come on for the first night of the season.

The next day is Christmas decoration day. We leave the house sometime in the late morning and head out to a tree farm in Morrow to pick out the perfect Christmas tree. It used to take us hours. Now we're becoming more and more efficient. I think we had our tree in 10 minutes last year. This year it took about 20 if you count cutting it down, but that's still not too shabby. After we've picked the tree we each get a new ornament to put on it. For a while we went to Elder Beerman's, then switched to Delhi Garden Center, and now we just get them at the tree farm. Many of us have gradually drifted from picking ornaments we actually like to picking the strangest ones we can find. The tree is weirder and weirder every year. As we drive home with the tree inside the van, we listen to Christmas music stations. Once we get home, Mom puts in the Oakridge Boys or the Partridge Family Christmas CDs. The day usually ends with watching the first Christmas movie of the season.

Christmas traditions are much more varied and have changed quite a lot over the past decade or so, so I'll just describe what we do now. On and off we participate in Advent, whether it's on our own or with the whole church. The weekend before Christmas my mom's side of the family gets together. We have a four-year location rotation between my mom, her sister in southern Michigan, her brother in Indianapolis, and her parents in northern Michigan. This year we'll be at Aunt Wendy's house. Every year we do something different together and then eat and open gifts. Christmas Eve we go to church, and Rachel and I usually play in an orchestral ensemble.

Christmas day, nobody is allowed to leave their room until 6:00 am. At that time, we can open our stockings. Everyone has to be awake by 8:00 am for official gift opening. When Cathy and Chris Gowen are in town, they join us. After we open gifts, we eat Panera bagels or cinnamon rolls for breakfast and hang out around the house until lunch time. Around 1:00 in the afternoon we head over to my dad's parents' house in Kenwood and repeat the process with his side of the family. When we get back home in the evening, we often watch a Christmas movie together.

I like tradition. I'm no Reb Tevia, but I like knowing that certain things will be roughly the same every year. I don't mind adding new things, but I am not a huge fan of taking away old traditions. I guess it goes along with being a person of habit. I wonder how things will grow and change as our family grows and changes. One day all seven of us kids will be out of the house. Will we live close enough to get together? Will we have our own kids to add to the mix? Will we still get up to do puzzles on Thanksgiving or open Christmas stockings at 6:00 am? Who knows. Only time will tell.