We follow a mixture of traditions at this time of year. I am half German, and a lot of what we do is based on German practices, tempered by English ones. Because we are not religious, and because we want Christmas to be more than a mere consumerist present-fest, we also think about the winter solstice.
We have the same advent calender every year. It comprises twenty five miniature books that tell the nativity story. Every day we read the story for that day, and hang the book on a little metal tree. Every year we have a mad panic at the beginning of December, trying to find where we put the tree last year. Steve is going up into the loft tomorrow to look for it…
Our real tree only goes up on Christmas Eve, and remains in the house just for the twelve days of Christmas. As a child I was always torn between being jealous of other peoples’ December-long decorations, and loving the magic of Christmas Eve when the tree finally appeared.
We bring lots of foliage indoors – the tree, obviously, but also holly, mistletoe and ivy. We have candles everywhere, including on the tree; the practice of burning candles on a tree comes from the tradition of burning a Yule log on the shortest day of the year.
Our tree decorations are simple: we hang straw stars and angels, as well as glass baubles, and a few decorations made by my boys over the years. It is topped with a straw angel made years ago by one of my German aunts, which is a version of the corn-dollies kept over the winter to ensure a fertile crop the following year.
We have a very old crib that I inherited from one of my German great aunts. Every year I tell myself that I really must mend the donkey’s legs, and stick the wise man’s head on with something better than blue tack. Every year all the pieces get wrapped up and put back in their box, unmended. I have gone through this thought process so many times that it has become something of a tradition in itself.
This year, as you can see, my advent ‘wreath’ is more of an advent ‘arrangement’. I could pretend that it’s an artful and carefully-planned minimalist decoration, but that would be somewhat stretching the truth!
I’d love to hear about some of your traditions – what special ways do you have of celebrating at this time of year?
That is an absolutely beautiful photograph! All the more effective for just the one candle being lit too.
We’ve just been to order our trees today, and we’ll be decorating them next weekend. This is outrageously early for us but Joel is away the following weekend so it’s the only free day we have to do it. Looking forward to seeing more Christmassy photographs from you!
Gorgeous photograph.
I’m really not sure about a tree this year with a little one, last year she wasn’t mobile so it wasn’t an issue but I’m hesitating a bit because I dont really want to be picking up decorations or rescuing the tree every few minutes. We do have a fireguard though so I’m wondering whether I can tuck it away safe from small hands somehow. My mums birthday is mid december so in our house there are no trees/decorations until after her birthday.
I am not a christian and living in South Africa killed any winter celebrations- its real beachweather (around 30 at the moment) so we don’t do anything anymore- it’s just too wierd to celebrate the season- when its the wrong season all together.
Being brought up in Switzerland we used to light advent candles, st.claus came on the 6th, lebkuchen- houses and cinamonstars were my favorite thing of the season.
I sometimes do miss, the snow, winterlights, candles, nuts and mandarines, cristmasmarkets…ah
love your rituals and looking forward to seeing more of your decorations and photos
We’re still refining our traditions – it’s a mixture of my family (part Dutch, part Irish, part American, part what the hell that sounds like fun) and Himself’s family traditions and some other stuff picked up along the way. It’s 5th December next week, Sinterklaas comes visiting and brings biscuits (speculaas… mmmmm). Yep, Sinterklaas is also Santa who comes on Christmas eve, but 5th December is Sinterklaas, and Christmas Eve is Father Christmas and they’re not the same (to children, anyhow!)
Stockings, trees (fake), too much food and seeing family. Looking forward to it. If I can find my recipe for speculaas, that is!
Husby and I don’t really have any traditions yet – I think you need kids to really develop traditions, it makes it more fun somehow. So maybe next year…
But I always get stuck putting the decorations up!! Lucky I like doing it!
I have sort of adopted a little of the American traditions because of husband and kids and the fact that am not in Malawi anymore. We keep it simple. We decorate a tree sometime in the first week of Dec, put up a wreath, open the advent calendar each day, light advent candles. Back home, it wasn’t anything like that. Infact, just a nice meal on Christmas was really it.
I really like to hear about other traditions too, so thanks for sharing yours.
We don’t have a lot of fixed traditions, other than not putting the baby into the creche until after Midnight Mass (I’m Catholic). My father has a December birthday, and he insisted we not put out any decorations until after the 14th; I used to spend hours every Christmas Eve wrapping all the presents for the family. Now that I’m married, we usually do everything the first weekend in December, but we’ll be away this year, so we’re putting up a garland to decorate sometime this week. And the presents were wrapped today!
Everything sounds very serene in your house. I have only just located the advent calenders and washed them. Nothing like being efficient!
How lovely. I really love the sense of wanting to make Christmas something more than just consumerism, but also not going down too much of a religious route (if at all). I love your way of doing this.
It’s so hard to do the candles thing much when it doesn’t get dark til nearly 9pm though!
Thank you for sharing your traditions – its fun to see how other people celebrate this season.
My sister and I are both Christmas elves in disguise! Her house is already decorated – tree and all. I’ll put up a post on the blog about our traditions.
Michelle
My Grandma was from Austria and we always celebrated St. Nicholas day with a stocking with candy and an orange in the toe. My Dad used to do the tree on Christmas Eve, too. I thought Santa did it and it was always such a special thing. Looking back I have no idea how he did it all in one night. We do a pickle in the tree with a present for the person who finds it and we decorate a gingerbread house every year, first with the children and now with the grandchildren.
I love your cloth and candleholders! We light a candle for each of the Sundays in Advent, and we place things on our Advent table, building it up week by week. I’ve blogged about it ad nauseum in the past …
beautiful – thank yo for sharing
I’d love to hear more about the advent candle tradition – yours is the second blog I’ve read it on this week, and I don’t know much about it’s origins?
What a beautiful post. I love the advent books and tree…beautiful tradition. I actually just started reading your blog a couple of weeks ago too and I look forward to each new post!