me too! It's all up until epiphany
Posted By: Get outside on 2006-12-11
In Reply to: jan 2nd? what happened to 12 days of Xmas?.... - bringing y'all to Jan 5-6, the epiphany?....sm
I keep to the church calendar. And, many years ago when DH and I were very strapped for cash and our children were small and full of wonder, we told everyone that we could only give gifts to our children. And that's the way it's been since then. We give only to the kids. In fact, DH and I haven't given gifts to each other for years. We just make a point of spending time alone together, including one full evening of doing something terrific and FREE. Once all the gift-giving stress was gone, we had no stress at all during the season. Now that our financial situation is better and the boys are older, we still keep the gift giving modest within the family. The kids are 18, 17 and 16, and they just don't need that much. One or two nice gifts a piece does it. So now we try to give more to the community. This was the very first year that I could pick more than one person from our "giving tree" at church. And my youngest son's boy scout troop went to Build-a-Bear to make stuffed bears to be donated to kids in the hospital. It was nice to be able to contribute to those things. All of that stuff makes the holiday special.
My father-in-law died just about two weeks ago. He was a really nice guy and we'll miss him. It really helps to focus on the season and not on the commercialism.
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We take our trees down after Jan 6, Epiphany.
After 24 years of marriage, we managed to collect a lot of ornaments. One tree is only for glass ornaments, most of which I inherited from mom and grandmother. Our kids are grown, so no worry about breakage, but that tree is usually real and goes in our front room. In our family room, we have an old artificial tree. The tree was being thrown out by a friend, and so we asked for it, and he laughed and said, "Sure!" For 10 years we've been using that throw-away tree. It's pretty Charlie Brown-ish when it's naked, but we throw all the little collected things on it -- the stuff the kids made out of macaroni when they were little, ornaments we picked up here and there or were given to us as gifts. All of those ornaments will be divided up and given to our sons when they move out. One is 20 and the other is 18, so perhaps soon, at least some of those will be adorning someone else's first Christmas tree.
It is a pain to take it all down, so I'm not looking forward to Sunday. Lots of sorting and storage to be done, and then everything has to get packed away up in the attic for another year.
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