Why I Love Christmas

I love Christmas. It is by far my most favorite holiday. I often wish we could back Halloween up a month to the end of September. We could then back Thanksgiving up a month as well and give it the credit it deserves as a holiday. I am often so excited for Christmas, that I want to get Thanksgiving over just so I can start decorating for Christmas. I know there are many people who start getting ready for Christmas earlier, but I often can’t bring myself to do it because I feel like I am demeaning the value of Thanksgiving. With all of that said, I am so excited for Christmas and starting to get ready.

To me, Christmas is all about the decorations, yummy food, and being with family. I often joke about how my mom could fill a moving truck with all of her Christmas decorations. That may not be entirely true, but she does have a lot-and I love it. I hope to someday have my own truck-load of decorations. Growing up, I always spent part of my Thanksgiving break helping my mom and my siblings decorate the house. We would set up the tree so we could decorate it as a family while all of my older siblings were home from college. Once I became the college student coming home for the break, I often looked forward to decorating the tree. Every year my mom got us each an ornament to add to the tree that often represented something that occurred in our lives for the past year, so decorating the tree is always like a trip down memory lane. Now that I have my own home, I have been given those Christmas ornaments and I use them to decorate my own little tree. I also love the Nativities that my mom has collected throughout the years. Between my parent’s travels, the travels of my siblings, and my mom’s own artistic talent, my mom has collected several Nativities from all over the world that she displays each Christmas. I have started a little collection of my own and hope to add more to it little by little.

Often when people start thinking about Christmas, it is the family traditions that seem to make it first into our minds. If you ask me about family traditions that we have, most of them would involve food in some way. Many of the treats we had at Christmas were things that we only had once a year (not that we didn’t have them the rest of the year, there were just special ones for Christmas). Peanut butter Hershey Kiss cookies, toffee, peanut brittle, sugar cookies, spritz cookies, and fudge are a few of the ones that come immediately to mind. My mom would spend the first few weeks of December making these treats little by little and freeze them so they would be ready for Christmas. We always made up goodie plates to take to friends and kept some for ourselves as well. Our Christmas meals were almost always the same-potato soup and cold cut sandwiches for Christmas Eve dinner (an tradition from my Dad’s family), an egg-sausage casserole for Christmas morning, and ham and funeral potatoes for Christmas day. None of them are anything overly fancy, but are things that I think everyone in my family loves.

Finally, I love Christmas because of the time spent with family in friends. As one of the younger kids in my family, it was a time when all of my older siblings came home. Starting at a young age, that became the thing I really looked forward to at Christmas. Now as we are all older, we rarely all make it home at the same time. However, when some of us do make it home, we have a great time (whether its Christmas or not). When we get together we play games, watch movies, play sports, and mostly laugh and talk. As my husband can attest, we are a loud bunch of people when we get together. There is never a quiet moment-someone always has a story or a joke to tell. We stay up until all hours of the night, enjoying the time we have together.

Finally, I love how Christmas is the celebration of the birth of our Savior. It is a time to reflect on the life of our Savior and the many things that He has done for us. He has brought us peace, salvation, and love. I am so blessed to have the knowledge of Him as my Savior, Redeemer, and Friend. As it is said He is “the reason for the season.”

That is why I love Christmas.