Christmas is my favorite time of year. Not only is it because it is the end of the year, it is also because there is so much going on. My family seemingly does a lot around the holiday season, as any family would, so I thought it would be interesting to share their traditions.
About a week or so prior to Christmas, we make Christmas cookies. My twin sister loves to make snowball cookies with crushed Nilla Wafers, condensed milk, nuts, and powdered sugar, which she learned to make in cooking class in high school. My parents make a ton of Italian cookies, like ricotta cookies, pignoli cookies, and even a rainbow cookie recipe that takes two days to make! Aside from that, we also make chocolate chip cookies, and whoopie pies, my favorite out of all the cookies we make alongside my sister’s snowball cookies.
For Christmas Eve, we start off with dinner, which, since we are Italian-American, is the Feast of the Seven Fishes. It’s not known how this tradition became popular with Italians, but it represents how in the old days Roman Catholics abstained from eating meat on feast days, and it also comes from how Italy has an abundance of seafood. We usually get the fish for this feast from local fish markets in Long Island, especially in Islip and Babylon. I usually eat spaghetti and clam sauce, crab cakes, and baked clams.
After dinner, we go to my aunt’s house in Lindenhurst for a Christmas Eve party. We first start out by singing Christmas songs, including a parody of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” about one of my uncles helping out during a power outage. We usually FaceTime him before we sing it so he can hear it, since he lives in Florida. After that, one of my cousins dresses up as Santa and gives prank gifts. For example, one year, he made fake AI DVD covers, and in one of them, all the uncles were represented as Muppets. One prank gift I remember was getting a retirement hat during my second year working at Showcase Cinemas.
Christmas Day usually is uneventful besides opening gifts and having dinner at our house, but it also has an unexpected tradition. I work at a movie theater, which is open all year round. So what do I do at night on Christmas Day? I work! Christmas is usually one of our most crowded days. We get tons of families coming in to see movies. This year, I’ll have to deal with the newest “Avatar” movie, as well as “David,” an animated religious movie, and “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.” Since we have two animated movies this year, I expect this to be like when “Mufasa: The Lion King” and “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” came out last year, since both were family films that came out around the same time.
I really have fun around the Christmas season, even if it’s in small ways like working on a holiday or enjoying Christmas cookies. I love seeing my out-of-town family members, like my brother, who often visits for Christmas from Los Angeles. These things make Christmas the most magical time of the year for me.