Christmas Eve was spent here with my parents. Polish Catholics celebrate on the Eve with a traditional meat-free meal, as it's still Advent. And so, we serve fish and grain products and vegetables. Traditionally, after midnight mass, you'd return to have a second meal, this time with meat. In Quebec, this same tradition persists with tourtière which is a meat pie served after mass. In my family, that part of the tradition has never been observed; I have never yet been to a midnight mass, and frankly, eating meat pie in the middle of the night doesn't hold much appeal either.
Our abridged, much more convenient tradition, involves a supper of wild mushroom soup, fish (traditionally carp but we had salmon), pierogi, and numerous vegetables, (but beets have to be on the list). We start supper when the first stars appear in the sky. Before sitting down, we exchange a small wafer with everyone. This is a small rectangle made of the same stuff as communion wafer. It's imprinted with various nativity scenes and it's been blessed by the priest. Everyone gets a chunk of this and you exchange greetings with each person individually: they break a piece off yours and eat it, you break a piece of theirs and eat it, then you embrace and wish each other a Merry Christmas.
Roo has gone through 20 of these dinners with us and many years ago he discovered that there's sometimes a long delay between courses as we heat, reheat, or try to will the salmon to cook, or the soup to uncurdle..... and so he started his own tradition of getting small wind up toys which we race around the table in between courses. This year we had bobble-head cars. We also have party crackers, and wear silly crowns and read the jokes....because it's Christmas, and "it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself". 
After the meal, the kids opened their presents from the grandparents, and the small Christmas Eve gifts from us. Just a note: if you give a child a stopwatch which also has an alarm function, don't indulge him by agreeing to set it to go off early the next morning....not unless you really want to get up at the crack of dawn..... The kids got up early (courtesy of Roo setting the stopwatch - ahem) to find their presents from Santa under the tree. We spent most of the day in jammies, and I made everyone lie down for a rest/nap in the early afternoon. Then a quick shower and a walk over to Roo's parents' place for Christmas dinner with several hundred other relatives. Well, it felt like several hundred. It may have been just a few dozen. Including the Victoria people - whose presence was totally unexpected! Nobody told us you guys were coming! Lovely suprise! Except we didn't have prezzies for the Victoria kids! Ack!
Hugo got this smashing tabletop pinball baseball game. Grandma let him pick it out himself from the LL Bean catalogue. Amelia got a great electronic guessing thingy from the Victoria cousins. It asks a bunch of questions and tries to guess what you're thinking; you have to answer questions yes, no, sometimes, unknown. I keep using it to make it guess rude things. So far it's guessed (incorrectly) muscle and gland. It can easily guess things like space shuttle, rope, and hamster.
Today, the second day of Christmas, Roo & I puttered about online, shopping for a couple electronics items. I love online boxing day sales! Deals with no crowds! Playing with the kids, cleaning up some of the piles of wrapping.... a nice lazy day.
Santa has this idea that as a family we should play board games and each year he delivers a couple. This year it was Clue (the classic bilingual version, with real metal weapons!) and the anniversary edition Monopoly (in a metal collector tin). Holy heavens above. Clue almost did me in this afternoon. Yes, it was Hornblower, with the cat food, in the kitchen......Roo is trying to teach them to play Monopoly now. I think I liked the Monopoly Junior (where you buy booths at an amusement fair) better. At least it usually lasted less than an hour.......and they haven't even really started playing yet. Some of our other seasonal traditions
The Stanley Park train ride - here is our train going into a tunnel. The children's area of the park is decorated in tons of lights, there are carols playing on the train, and a stiltwalker in costume comes out to do a dance as we drive by - this year it was a gingerbread boy.
Listening to Dave Cooks the Turkey on the Vinyl Cafe's Christmas Concert CD There are some other funny Christmas editions, including Morley's Christmas concert, and the time Dave and Morley were going to go to the maritimes for Christmas and got stuck at a truckstop in a snowstorm......Listening to any episode of the vinyl cafe works for us.
Listening to the CBC's recording of the Christmas Carol
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