Traditions

I am pondering the traditions of my family. We have some quirky ones. For instance on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, we greet each other with "Christmas Eve Gift" or "Christmas Gift" respectively. This has been in my mom's German/English/? family for many generations, apparently. No one seems to know where it came from or why. The idea behind it is that the person who says the greeting first earns a gift from the laggard. In my lifetime, not one gift has ever changed hands, but that has not kept us from being sneaky, designing and sometimes deceitful in order to "get" Christmas Gift on someone. I don't know how my ancestors accomplished it, but the advent of the telephone sure must have made it interesting.

When I was a child, in the days of rotary telephones with no caller ID, You just belted out "Christmas Gift" to whatever unsuspecting person happened to call on that day. I think I might have started the rapid repetition of "Christmas Gift before I lifted the phone from the cradle. The caller likely heard "click 'mas gift or something like that, but they could hardly argue that they got me! The advent of caller ID could have made it easier. If we had been a normal family we could have screened calls and said "hello" to normal people and gleefully screamed "Christmas Gift" to our relatives...except...our relatives are crazy, deceitful at this time of year and stubbornly determined to "get" you. People in our family would have flown to a foreign country to borrow a phone so that the caller ID would say something like unnamed caller Guatemala. That never really happened because we were all too poor to do that, but it would have had Ed McMahon dropped by beforehand with our Publisher's Clearing House money. Since he never came, we were reduced to borrowing the cell phones of strangers to call home, or sneaking into back offices to project an innocent looking phone number. After about maybe ONE Christmas of that foolishness, we were back to the old ways of deafening ALL callers with our Christmas cheer, regardless of whether they deserved (or understood) it or not.

I love technology sometimes. Though I am a notoriously poor texter and avoid it whenever possible, after my nieces and nephews started "getting" folks through texts, I resorted to Facebook. That way it is right there on their wall with a time stamp. Aha! Gotcha! Oh I love you Facebook! Especially these 2 days of the year! I must admit, it backfired on me last night when I had successfully "gotten" my nieces who were blissfully sleeping or something in their more Easterly time zones and then to my dismay, when I thought I had "gotten" my nephew Jonathan, he reminded me that he was no longer East of me, but West and that it wasn't midnight for 8 more minutes. Drat! Crazy kids, moving around like that. He really messed me up!Well, regardless of what time zone you live in, I want to say one thing. CHRISTMAS GIFT! Bwahahahah!

God bless your heart and sweet dreams.
Lawana