[X] My Assistant

[ustrax]

This is really a topic that has nothing to do with Unmanned Spaceflight, or maybe we can find some links to it...

The question is more to see how we celebrate Christmas to see the differences between our national and local traditions.

Where do you, how do you, with who do you celebrate Christmas?
Any place for space in there?

I'll spend mine at my sister's home (the biggest of all) in Queluz, the city where I lived untill left my parents house, it's an opportunity to review old friends, smells and places, to walk through the palace gardens with my nephews...
The Christmas evening starts in the afternoon when everybody starts gathering, my sister, brother-in-law, nephews, my parents, my b-i-l dad and sister, me, my woman, my dog, my sister's dog...
This year there will be no grandparents, one died in August and the other is in the hospital and not very well and no one could convince my grandmother to gather for Christmas...I hope things get really better for 2007, that's one of my strongest wishes...
We eat a lot, as everyone, before dinner, talk a lot, laugh a lot, discuss a lot (we're latins you know...), watch all the classics, and for dinner the tradition is to eat this great codfish with tons of vegetables and potatoes and egg, all drowned in massive doses of olive oil...
Then the indispensable coffee with digestive and more talk, and more digestive, and more food.
At midnight we go to the church's ceremony in the middle of the cold with the kids protesting and, finally, in the return, we open the presents (there will be some Hawking book for me, and socks too...) and drink and eat and sing some songs...
Now it is time to each return to their houses, to have some sleep to gather again in the morning after with the kids displaying their new toys and clothes.
Everyone smells nice and we visit other relatives to...eat! This time lamb...
That's it...Untill we meet all again for King's Day (January, 6th) to eat King's Cake...
The New Year will be in the North of Portugal, in the Minho region, but that's another story...
Man...I'm hungry!...

[dvandorn]

Hmm... this is a question that, for me, has several answers, depending on the epochs of my life.

When I was a child, it was unbearable weeks of waiting, helping Dad find and trim a tree, being as good as I possibly could, listening for reindeer paws on the roof on Christmas Eve, being forced to eat *something* (I usually managed to choke down a piece of toast) for breakfast before opening our presents on Christmas morning, the smells of baked ham, candied yams and pumpkin pie making me hugely hungry as I played with new games, assembled new plastic models, or just read a new book, helping my Mom make ham salad out of the leftover ham the day after Christmas...

When I was a young man, fresh out of college and married, it was rushing to get all the presents wrapped, going to my Polish mother-in-law's for a Christmas Eve dinner of roast goose, polish sausage and pierogi (yum!), opening presents, rushing home, trying to get to sleep early so we could get up early, pack up the car on Christmas morning, driving three hours to my folks' house, explaining we'd already eaten (if we had or not), opening more presents, sitting down for the familiar (and still scrumptuous) ham dinner, helping Mom make ham salad Christmas evening, and then rushing back another three hours home...

On one very, very dark Christmas eight years ago, it was sitting at my folks' house, staring at a hastily-raised artificial tree and wondering bleakly just how many more days my aging and ill Dad was going to live (turned out to be only another fifteen days). Getting the flu (from hanging out at a hospital for way too many hours a day for the previous six weeks) and spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day being violently ill.

During my second marriage (after I had become a confirmed Wiccan, which is a pagan religion to all those who aren't familiar with the term), it was buying Yule presents, having a pleasant Yule ritual with friends on Winter Solstice, in which we would act out the old dramas of ignorance in which men beseeched their gods to *please* let the days start getting longer again, exchanging Yule presents, and gathering around our brightly decorated Yule tree...

Nowadays, it's having about thirty seconds of private contemplation of the cycles of life on the Winter Solstice, trying to find one of my high-school-kid managers at my Pizza Hut who can run my store for two days without causing a major disaster so I can visit with my 75-year-old mother, helping her make a small ham steak for us and my brother, exchanging a few presents, and driving the 18-hour round trip between Minneapolis and central Illinois praying that no ice storms or snow storms keep me from getting back to my store in time to finish my year-end inventory, which has to be completed and logged in the computer by midnight, December 25 -- and arriving to find that the computer has everything AFU, my inventory counts are primarily set to zeroes, I can't set new closing inventory amounts, and the help desk is a recording rather diffidently wishing everyone a Merry Xmas... *sigh*...

I think, of all of them, I'd rather be a child again... Heck, between now and eight years ago, I'm not totally sure which is worse.

-the other Doug