Is that a rooster I hear or just my dad with a cold?

 

 One of my favorite things about the holiday season is hearing the different traditions families use to celebrate Christmas. It’s amazing to hear some the stories families have regarding their holiday traditions. I think some of you might find my family’s story pretty amusing.

My immediate family came from pretty humble beginnings. I am one of five kids, three boys and two girls. When I was a child, my dad didn’t have the best paying job and my mom worked just to help pay for the kid’s tuition. Needless to say, money was a little bit tight, forcing us to make due with the bare minimum sometimes (ex: powdered milk instead of regular milk…soup and rice for dinner 4 times a week) and appreciate even the smallest things. During Christmas time the reality of money rang even more true, forcing us to compensate for what we didn’t have by using what we did. I remember waking up one Christmas morning only to find my mom’s panty hose hanging on the wall in place of the Christmas stockings. My parents couldn’t afford to get us real stockings so they used my mom’s “stockings” instead. Most people would be appalled at the sight of their mom’s stockings hanging from the wall. I would have been, but those stockings can really stretch so that meant we got a lot more stuff in them. Unfortunately, a lot of times the stuff we got wasn’t always that great. While some families help stuff stockings with fruit and nuts my family couldn’t afford those luxuries. Not wanting to leave our stockings empty, my mom and dad created a “vegetable of the year.” Imagine the look on your kids faces when they pull a potato out of their stockings on Christmas morning (that was our first vegetable of the year.) When it came time for opening presents our family savored every moment. We had a rule that everyone opened one present at a time while everyone else watched. This helped extend the experience and make up for getting less presents than normal. Other great Johnson family traditions include:

1) Choosing the sex of the Christmas tree (Is it going to be Mr or Mrs Tree this year?)

2) The name of the tree (my sister always named the tree after her current boyfriend)

3) Putting the angel on the top of the tree (dad would always hold up one of the little ones so they could do it)

4) Getting presents from “Daddy Clause.”

 5) Waking up very early in the morning to the sound of my dad crowing like a rooster to wake up the kids.

6) Going back to sleep after opening presents and eating breakfast. My mom and dad usually spent Christmas Eve night wrapping all the presents and setting up the living room. As a result, they wouldn’t get to bed until the wee hours of the morning. The kids woke up sometime between 5-7 out of anticipation for present opening which meant my mom and dad only got a couple hours of sleep.

 I wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything. This morning I was probably the only kid in the world happy to see his mom’s panty hose hanging on the wall and find a beet in his stocking.