[media-credit name=”Cat Cooper” align=”alignnone” width=”1020″]
“We all decorate the tree together and put up our ‘sibling ornaments.’ We put them all together on the tree and spend Christmas together. My mom writes poems and gives us all little ones on each of the twelve days of Christmas.”
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“We eat [during New Year’s] and have a couple conversations about how things have been, because I’m usually away, just to catch up. After we eat, we watch TV together. I was told that because noodles are long, that it’s a symbol for hoping for longevity.”
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“It started very randomly… the Polar Express was on and that was my parents’ favourite movie. It was on a TV channel, and then after that came on a Canada’s Worst Driver marathon, and we were all just laughing so hard at this Canada’s Worst Driver marathon — this was probably when I was seven or eight or so — we joked about it for so long afterwards and then the next Christmas Eve there was another Canada’s Worst Driver marathon on. Then we found out that every Christmas Eve there’s a Canada’s Worst Driver marathon, and so just about every year since then, without fail, we’ve watched a full season of Canada’s Worst Driver every Christmas Eve.”
[media-credit name=”Cat Cooper” align=”alignnone” width=”1020″]
“My heritage is Danish, so one tradition that we do is we have a big smorgasbord every New Year’s day. This tradition has been going on since before I was born, and we get my whole family around the table. A smorgasbord consists of open face sandwiches, so my father creates 50 to 60 sandwiches and we have this special liquor called “akvavit” that we have at the meal. The meal lasts for about two to three hours and we just sit around as a family and chat and talk about the year that we had and what we look forward to for the next year. It’s a really good time for us to come together as a family, talk, and reconnect.”
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“On Christmas Day we have our own personal Christmas at our house. Traditionally, cinnabons every morning, for sure, that’s a big one. After our personal Christmas, we go over to my grandma’s house where we meet up with family from other cities, and we spend the day there and have a full course meal. She’s Italian, so full course meal. We catch up, especially with me at school it’s hard to know what’s going on in everybody’s lives.”
[media-credit name=”Cat Cooper” align=”alignnone” width=”1020″]
“On Christmas Eve, my dad always used to bring my family and I the largest box of assorted chocolates you could ever see. We would all just bite [a chocolate] all at once and put it back. We wouldn’t eat them whole, we would just bite them, and put them back, just to see what the inside tasted like. Then, of course, we would make cookies for Santa and stuff like that, but that was my favourite part.” (left) “My dad would bake cookies and my younger brother and I would just wait for them to be cooked, and then we’d have them right away.” (right)
Graphic by Alora Griffiths/The Ontarion