Technicolor Day

Traditions

I'm working on changing some family traditions. Or rather, making my own and making them stick, I guess.
My mom was always the stockng-stuffing queen, and if you hang your stocking (pinned to the couch, not actually hanging), you'd get it filled. Adult and child alike. And as kids, our biggest gifts would be from Santa, in the stocking or next to. That was part of the reason for using the couch, the spoils spilled all over the place.
As a kid, at first it was very magical. As an older (read: no-longer-believing-but-just-playing-along) kid, it was fun, and there came a point when I would help mom buy the junk to fill the stockings. And always, no matter how old I've gotten (and remember, I'm getting pretty darned old!), I still get a big stocking full of junk.
When my kids were little, I kept the tradition, as we do when we are first away from our parents. After all, they were the traditions we grew up with, so they must be, at the very least, 'right' and at most, the same thing everyone else does. But I do remember the lean holidays. The stuffing-the-stocking-with-dollar-store-junk year. And the I-scrimped-and-saved-and-"Santa"-got-all-the-credit?!? year. And trying to keep my family's traditions with my ex-husband's family just didn't work. I guess that was when I really realized that not everyone did the stocking stuffers like my family did.
And after the divorce, when my mom got her years mixed up and thought it was my turn to have the kids on Christmas eve and day, when we opened gifts a few days later, we each had sacks of junk that was the stuff that would have gone into the stockings. And I use the word 'junk' lovingly, and now, really have to switch to the word that rings in my head: crap. My mom loves to shop, and has a bit of a who-ever-dies-with-the-most-junk kind of issue, a collector, if you will. So those things put together, what ends up in the stockings is unfortunately mostly crap. (and not that there are not nice presents under the tree also, just to fill up the stockings, there's lots of cheap crap) We still have a box mostly full of stocking crap from a few years ago, that no one was very interested in, so just got left in the box. And me with my trying-to-get-mimimalistic tendancies, I just want to give it all away.
So this year, the kids are with me, and my folks. We will hang the stockings, but I won't put the kid's biggest gift in there. I may not put anything in there at all. But I won't stop my mom from her fun. I told my kids tonight that grama had probably already bought the junk for the stockings already. I guess that's my gift to my mom. Letting her shop to her heart's content and enjoying the crap Christmas morning. And next year, we won't hang stockings, since the kids will be with their dad on 'stocking hanging day.'
And new traditions will grow and prosper.

posted by Unknown at 9:17 PM