Christmas here really starts on Christmas Eve. While most of the world is cleaning up pine needles from a 3 to 4 week old Christmas tree and plotting the de-decorating of their home the day after New Years Day we are busy getting our tree standing up to decorate it tonight.
Christmas Eve day was spent with Poppa and the boys outside putting up the lights on the house and bushes and setting up the nativity set on the lawn. Erica oversaw the placement of the holy family and made sure that the moving reindeer had plenty of hay to eat.
The women folk planned tonights dinner and got out the decorations for tonight. We also orchestrated “the outfits” which this year were an understated white shirts with khaki/brown pants/skirts. Traditional Catholics do not decorate until Christmas Eve as close to midnight as possible because that is when Christmas really starts. It is not until the last hundred years that the stores got us all used to decorating and shopping early to boost sales. Anyhoo… at 11:00 we started to put the lights and decorations on the tree and decorate the house while Christmas music played all day.
As soon as the tree was done we rolled out our amazingly wonderful Christmas Eve dinner. On the menu was the most tender ever Salmon, mashed potatoes, green beans roasted with almonds and asparagus. We do not eat meat on Christmas Eve (which is still something for me to get used to being spanish and eating pork all my life on Christmas Eve).
When we were done we gave the kids their first 12 nights of Christmas presents, new pajamas. We have been doing the new pajamas since they were babies and my parents did it for me. Then, we bundled up the troops and headed for Mass to await the arrival of baby Jesus.
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