The Nerdy Girlie and SuperSpaceChick started Five Fandom Friday as a community building project, and we jumped on board. We just love things numbered in fives, so we’ve added their topics to our Five Things feature. Check out this week’s #Fandom5 under the cut.
Mine is very similar to Liz’s in that it’s about Hallmark ornaments, but in my family, it’s specifically the Peanuts collection. Every year since I can remember (or since Hallmark started making them – I don’t know which came first), my mom buys me at least one of the ornaments from the Peanuts collection. I know now there are multiple ornaments a year, but back in the day I think they only had one. Anyway, I have a ton of them, and even though I’m 32, I still get one every year. In fact, she just gave me the above one last weekend!
It is kind of funny to me how traditions start without you even realizing it. Maybe it is because ABC Family and other networks run the holiday movies to death, but we always seem to watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation on or around Christmas. I swear, I watched this movie when I was younger and I didn’t pick up on SO MUCH so it is odd watching it as an adult. I don’t know what it is about that movie, but I can’t get enough of it. Plus, it kind of reminds me of my interesting family holiday moments.
I recognize the dorkiness of what I’m about to say, but the holiday tradition that I’m most looking forward to is putting together jigsaw puzzles. Whenever I go to my parents’ house at Christmas-time, my mom always has a jigsaw puzzle out, and I will sit and obsessively work on it for hours. I know puzzles aren’t necessarily seasonal, but for me it’s just one of those things that I associate with Christmas. (And the one in the picture looks so hard–I wants it.)
This is a mostly defunct tradition, because it was my grandmother’s and she’s been gone for a while now. But when my cousins and I were younger, my grandmother would buy each one of us an ornament every year. She had a little notebook and she kept a log of what she bought which kid. For the most part she’d let us choose – I loved Hark, It’s Herald and the series with the bear and the penguin, while my sister preferred Puppy Love – but sometimes she’d surprise us with something rad like the year she bought me a Luke Skywalker ornament. Decorating the tree was a big deal, both at my grandma’s house and at my own, and I somehow inherited all the ornaments. Each year I like to put on some Christmas music, make some cocoa, and go over each ornament before I hang it on the tree to remember my grandmother.
The house I grew up in was right across the street from the one little park in town. Every Christmas, someone in my neighborhood would put up a tree and string it with lights, and then on Christmas Eve after it got dark everyone would gather around it to sing a few carols and then my not!dad would read the Christmas story. Afterwards my parents threw an INFAMOUS party at our house, so just about everyone would walk over and it was the best. My parents moved when I was 18 BUT (here’s the Christmas miracle) my not!dad and his family ended up buying our house and carried on the tradition. My hometown is about 2 hours away from where I live now but we still drive there for singing and drinking and lots of hugging. I don’t really care what I end up doing for the rest of the holiday, as long as this one tradition stays the same.
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