Hey! Can you believe it's Christmas Eve (Christmas Day for my beloved Internationals) already?!?

My immediate family always celebrates the holiday on Christmas Eve. As the four of us were carrying out our family traditions of making home-made eggnog and watching Christmas flicks, I wondered what some of your holiday traditions were.

Feel free to share!

Merry Christmas, Holy Worlds!

~Calen

It's different year to year, as I go from one parent's house to the other for Christmas. With my mother's side of the family, we always stay up 'till midnight to open our presents. Apparently that's a Hispanic thing to do. I had no idea that people in America usually waited until Christmas morning. Then we spend about 1-3 hours playing with our new toys. Or at least that's what I did when I was younger. I went to bed around 1 this year. :3 Usually it's just close family. But my aunt brought her new boyfriend (I'm so excited for her) along. We all played Pictionary and had lots of fun.

My father's side of the family does things a bit differently. We sing a few songs and play White Elephant. I hope you don't mind me going off tangent, but here's a funny story from two years ago. One guy was opening up his gift and ended up with a purse. And the entire time no one stole it from him. In the end, he walked out of the house with a new 'man-bag'. The gender specific gifts can be hilarious when they end up in the right hands. There's also a game where someone reads a story and a gift is passed around. Every time the word 'left' is said, the gift is passed left. The same goes for the word 'right'.

If I have to be honest, I like spending Christmas with my dad's side of the family. But at least my mom's side always has tons of pie!

Merry Christmas!

Well, we always spend Christmas Eve together as a family, and we always watch a film in the evening.

On Christmas Day Mike and Louise were here this year, they spend one year at Lou's family's house for Christmas, and the next at ours. So it was lovely to have them here.

We always have our Christmas Dinner at around 1pm. Dad always cooks Christmas Dinner, it's something he has always done. Mother helps with setting it out, but Dad always cooks everything.

We always play some games in the evening (It was Family Fortunes this year) and we generally watch a Christmas film together in the evening.

We usually open our gifts in the morning, but it was afternoon this year as Rachel had the horse to sort etc before we were ready.

Our tree usually goes up early. This year it went up even earlier, on the day after Thanksgiving. We have a few special ornaments that we hang on the tree, like my first Christmas ornament, a little cross-stitched ornament my mom made, etc.

On Christmas Eve, my mom & I do lots of baking. Usually we take a couple tins of cookies over to my two aunts' houses which are across the street from our house. We stay and visit a little while.

Later, we usually have a "snack"-y kind of dinner, like cheese cubes, a veggie tray & Ranch dip, different kinds of crackers, pepperoni, etc. We have a tradition where I go to bed about 30 minutes early, and my parents finish last-minute gift wrapping.

We usually get up around 8 AM (my parents always say, "don't wake us up until 8 AM" even though they usually get up by themselves around 7:30 PM ). It was different this year because I was sick with a sore throat. I got up around 9 AM. We always open our stockings first, then make breakfast.

After breakfast, we open our gifts. We generally save the main present for opening last. We spend a couple hours "playing" with our presents, doing assembly, etc.

In the evening, my dad grills steak. We used to do a ham, but a couple years ago we decided we'd try doing steak. It's our newest tradition.

Usually in the afternoon we go and visit my aunts' houses again, and they show us what they got for Christmas. Several years ago, we always celebrated Christmas at one of their houses, but it gets quite expensive to buy gifts for our family and two other extended families. I did a quick calculation - we'd have 23 people to get presents for next year!

If you ask Shorty about mine, I think she'll give you an interesting explanation.

My birthday is Christmas Eve, which always changes things up a bit in my family. My family is also of German heritage so we open our Christmas presents on Christmas Eve nights. Essentially it is my birthday until 3:30 in the afternoon when we finish eating cake, and then it is Christmas.

I open my birthday presents in the morning, and do cake at 3. Then we go to church at 7 and come home and open Christmas presents. My dad hands the presents out one at a time and we watch each person open his or her present. It takes a good long time that way. We usually finish around 11 or midnight and go to bed. In the morning we open our stockings from Santa. Then we lay around the house until we begin to make dinner. My brother pounds the meat for the rouladen shirtless (because the juice splashes his chest and makes him feel manly I guess), and my Oma and mom cook. We eat rouladen, kloeßle, rotkraut and other wonderful German food for dinner. My family also spent four years in Australia where we picked up the tradition of doing Christmas crackers before we eat. Its a British thing. Then we proceed to wear the paper crowns from the crackers the rest of the night. I recently got into Doctor Who the past two years, so my family has joined me the last two years in watching the Doctor Who Christmas special. Its a blast and I wouldn't change it for the world.