Celebrating holiday traditions

From merging two holidays together and decorating family trees to enjoying Christmas-related outdoor activities and attending mass, faculty and staff celebrate holidays in very special ways. Enjoy reading each other's rituals and memories passed down through cultures and generations. We hope this holiday season will be filled joyous traditions new and old. Happy Holidays!

Maly Bun
In my household we celebrate Christmukkah. What does that mean? Christmukkah is the merging of Christmas and Hanukkah - the two holidays my husband and I celebrate with our families.

For the eight nights and days during Hannukkah, sometimes known as the Festival of Lights, we light up one candle of our menorah progressing until the eighth and final night. Then it is on to Christmas celebrations.

On Christmas Eve, my family and I all get into Christmas pajamas, build a gingerbread house and watch the movie White Christmas. We also get to open one present of choice.

Christmas Day, is a busy day filled with family, food and lots of laughter and new family memories.

Emily Leighton
My Christmas tradition started one snowy Christmas Eve when I was eight years old.

It began, as was customary for my family of five, warming up by the fire after dinner and attending the Christmas Eve church service at Bishop Cronyn Memorial. But as we left the church that particular night, everyone agreed the jubilant carol singing had worked up an appetite. The only place open and accessible on the drive home was Jade Garden, a Chinese restaurant with a take-out menu. And so we stopped.

Twenty minutes later, my parents, three kids and two bags full of delicious-smelling Chinese food piled into our Caravan and headed home. We've kept that tradition going every year since, always enjoying an egg roll and chop suey as we eagerly await Christmas morning.

Eric Simard
Eight years ago, my family started a tradition of digitally capturing our family Christmas celebrations. This includes photography, video and audio clips of our day together. In time for the following Christmas, my dad puts this all together in a 3-5 min video. After a huge breakfast, we all sit down with our coffee, and watch each of the 8 videos back to back re-living our years together. It's always fun to see how we have all changed and we tend to laugh at the same old family jokes. Between the three siblings, we often refer to these videos as the girl and boyfriends of Christmas past!

Katerina Wai Yee Leung
Memories of Christmas in my family always include afternoons decorating the Christmas tree, wrapping presents, writing cards on the living room floor, and scrambling out the door for Christmas dinner at my cousins' house. In the hustle and bustle of preparing for the social aspect of Christmas though, we sometimes forgot what was most important.

Looking back, my fondest memories now are those times when we sat together in the living room to pray the Rosary during the evening as we waited to leave for Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.

Being Catholic has always been a part of my life, my family life, and who I am. While I hadn't always been passionate about my faith, it was a foundation and pillar for me that I don't think I could truly cherish enough. For me, praying the Rosary with my family in anticipation for Christmas Mass, where we celebrate with so many others the joy of the birth of Jesus Christ, really brings about a fullness of hope, joy, and peace to me, my family and to our relationship with one another - as if bringing all the days of waiting in joyful hope in the season of Advent into a neat beautiful gift, each decade of the prayer like a carefully pressed fold of wrapping paper on a present.

Mair Hughes
Whenever possible we still get a real tree, and typically we do not decorate it until quite close to Christmas. This year we are thrilled that the whole family will be home, traveling from Costa Rica and Miami to be here. We will decorate the tree when everyone gets here, and Zoe, our 6-year old grand-daughter will put the old home-made star on the top of the tree. Our tree has multi-coloured lights (even bubble lights!) and a mish-mash of ornaments, collected over the years, many of them home made.

On Christmas Eve day, we plan an outdoor activity, often skating, and then in the evening we hang the stockings and then settle in to watch a movies, always ending with A Christmas Carol, the ONLY version in our opinion, is the one starring Alistair Sim from 1971.

Christmas morning everyone wakes up to find their stockings lying at the foot of their beds (good old Santa). The stockings are stuffed with whole nuts (walnuts, almonds, filberts etc.), a mandarin orange or two, some Christmas chocolates, candy canes and one or two small wrapped gifts. The adults usually get a mind bending puzzle of some sort, to try and tackle over coffee. No gifts under the tree get opened until everyone is up and not until after breakfast! For the kids, part of breakfast has always been snack packs (those multi mini boxes of cereal) for as long as I can remember - I am the eldest of nine kids, so there was always a scramble amongst my six little brothers to get the Sugar Pops!

Christmas dinner is turkey with all the trimmings. We always have Christmas crackers, and after dinner these get pulled open and everyone wears a silly paper hats and reads the jokes out loud, usually to a chorus of groans. The day ends with more movies, pulling out old photo albums, a game or a jigsaw puzzle and lots of cuddles and napping with the little ones.

Peter Flanagan
I have two warm memories from Christmases in Ireland as a child and young teenager. Neither is a true Christmas tradition as such!

The first is celery - It's hard for us now to realize that in some places, for example Ireland in the 1950s, vegetables were seasonal foods. Lettuce and tomatoes were only available during the summer, for example! Celery was grown in late summer and autumn in banks heaped up with earth and came available leading up to Christmas. The exclusion of light meant that the celery was completely white. At our Christmas dinner we feasted on turkey, ham, spiced beef, turnip, parsnips and potatoes but raw sticks of celery in a tall glass had pride of place on the table! I still remember the crunch!

My second memory was almost a tradition - beagling. On St. Stephen's Day (Dec 26th, never Boxing Day!), we drove as a family to the Dublin mountains, which are really only hills, where many other families assembled - all dressed warmly and with strong waterproof shoes and boots on. At the appointed hour a pack of excited beagles were given the smell of a rabbit or hare and we were off across the fields! The object was to keep up with the dogs on foot - rarely possible except for some able cross-country runners! The beagles never caught any wildlife and, as dusk approached, a rendezvous was always arranged at (where else?) a pub! There we dried ourselves and the children sucked on lemonades while the adults toasted each other and the holiday season with "Black Velvets" (Guinness + champagne) or "Black-and-Tans" (Guinness + ale)!

Ronnine Elston
In December, my two kids, my mom and I all head out to Sloan's Nursery and Christmas Tree Farm in Bothwell.

While we don't actually cut down our own Christmas tree while we are there, enjoying the many other activities available at the farm has become a standing tradition in our family. We start by enjoying the hayride through the cut-your-own tree forest, then return to toast marshmallows and hotdogs around one of the many fire pits available.

While my mom and I warm up with coffee (and maybe a little Baileys), the kids play in the haystack maze and enjoy the zipline. It is a tradition we started a few years ago, and enjoy each year.

Jasmin Neil
Each year, my family hosts an open house on Christmas Eve for all of our family and friends. This has been something we've done for as long as I can remember. Preparation starts a few days before, with my mother and I spending time making appetizers and baked goods for the party.

Then, on Christmas Eve, our house is filled with friends and family, and sometimes the family of friends, all enjoying one anothers' company. As the party winds down, my sister and I get to open one present. This started when we were about four and six years old, and the present was always pajamas.

It took us a few years to catch on that my mother was purposely giving us our pajamas to open on Christmas Eve, and now, almost 25 years later, it has become a tradition we look forward to each year.

Elana Whelan
On New Year's Eve, my sister hosts a 'First-Footing Party'. In Scottish tradition, the first-foot is the first person to cross the threshold of a home after midnight on New Year's Eve brings good fortune for the coming year.