My Busy Busy Christmas Traditions

Every year when I unload around four month’s worth of Christmas content all at once in December, at least one person comes along and tells me I really ought to relax and take it easy over holiday break. You know, just chill and go to Christmas parties and eat junk food and play around like we did when we were kids. We have to work enough as it is now that we’re adults, let’s use the holidays as an excuse to be kids again, just for a little bit. I inevitably laugh at this, mostly at the very notion that drawing funny pictures for The Internet could ever be counted as “work.” But also, this IS how I spent the holidays as a kid! The Christmas season was always the busiest time of the year for me, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way!

Now, right off the bat, you need to keep in mind that me and my siblings were all homeschooled, so my parents were super keen to find outside activities we could get involved in and be socially active and all that stuff. Across the rest of the year, these extra circular activities were fairly well spaced out, but of course every single one had to have their own Christmas event during the same three weeks, so stuff kind of piled up in December. What’s more, you also have to keep in mind that a lot of the other stuff we did was church related, and we were members of a REALLY big church back in the day. It should go without saying that THEY, of all people, would have a lot of Christmas activities going on as well. So for most of my childhood, I recall the end of the year being an absolute flurry of activity and events. If anything, kicking back and taking things easy makes it feel LESS like Christmas to me.

And again, none of this is a complaint. I have a ton of fond memories of that flurry of stuff we did around December, especially because a lot of it included things we almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten to do otherwise. For one thing, there’s the parties. Holy COW I went to so many holiday get togethers as a kid. There’s the family gatherings, obviously, but right now I’m talking about all the other stuff. At any given year, I could look forward to at least three separate class parties at church, sometimes up to FIVE, plus an additional homeschooler group party, and at least one music class party, plus extra sub-parties taking place before or after any of the other activities these groups were doing during the year, AND the occasional wild card of some families throwing parties of their own and inviting us. I had a LOT of opportunities to stuff my face with other people’s Christmas cookies, is what I’m saying. Most of the time, our junk food intake was strictly monitored, so any chance to just pig out on unlimited sweets was a rare pleasure. And a whole STRING of those events one after another? My teeth HATED me for all the sugar I vacuumed up. Oh, and togetherness with friends and whatever. That too.

But that’s not really being “busy,” is it? I need to explain about all the stuff I was actually DOING at the close of every year. The most obvious thing would be children’s choir stuff. I mean, if we’re at church a lot, of course we’d have a lot of choir things going on, right? Christmas concerts and all that? Well, yeah, though I should also point out that we always had our BIG children’s choir production for the year over the summer (I guess to avoid school and stuff). Compared to the full-on stage musicals we did then, the Christmas productions usually felt comparatively simple. Just some basic recital stuff one Sunday morning, and maybe a token bit during whatever night the grown up choir did their big Christmas concert.  Usually no acting or costumes or living nativities will ill-behaved livestock or any of that (Although I DO recall being in a nativity thing during a class party one year, getting cast as one of the Wise Men but drafted into being Joseph when that kid no-showed, and being really annoyed that I couldn’t wear a crown any more). Still, it felt pretty important at the time. Dressing up all nice and fancy and standing up on the big stage in front of a whole sanctuary full of people, this was the big time, dang it! What’s more, our church was actually big enough to have TWO children’s choirs.

There was the full, regular choir where basically every kid in the congregation was a member by default so long as they showed up to practice on Wednesday. If your family were members and you were physically capable of being on stage for a performance, you were in. The ability to actually produce sound from your vocal chords was, at best, a nice bonus. The point was just to be involved in something, not to sound good. But THIS church had so many freakin’ kids all over the place that they could support a SECOND tier of children’s choir, one that could afford to be picky about whether or not the kids could actually sing. Back in the day, when I actually did stuff like take care of my vocal chords, I was decent enough to get promoted up to the second choir, which meant I was doing a whole second set of recitals on top of the regular ones. THIS choir was the one they’d send out to do stuff like sing at old folks homes or visit other churches for stuff. Heck, we even kind of, sort of, went on tour, by which I mean going on road trips for a single weekend over the summer. Hey, we rode on a bus. It felt like a big deal. So we’d get shipped out to do caroling and the like a few times in December, and also pull double duty during the yearly church choir concerts to sing some extra stuff after the main children’s choir had already done their thing. Sound like a lot of music? Oh, you don’t even know the half of it.

Our church ALSO had a youth orchestra that I played cello in, which was a whole second layer of activities to do. Not as much as the choir, mind you, because we quite frankly weren’t that great. I can only recall two public performances per year, at best. Still, it was one other thing to attend every Wednesday night, and one extra round of performances at Christmastime (and and extra Christmas party, too!) I think they kept the band recitals and the choir ones on separate nights, since I know I wasn’t the only kid who would have been double-booked otherwise, but that just meant more nights to dress up and go on stage. It retrospect, it’s kind of amazing I didn’t wind up doing more cosplay stuff than I already do, I clearly spent a lot of my childhood being conditioned to go on stage and show off. Anyway, that’s three sets of Christmas concerts to keep track off, why not add some more?

The lady who taught me and my siblings’ cello lessons taught a whole bunch of other kids too, and the whole lot of us would do random live performances around North Atlanta as a sort of advertisement for her teaching services. You ever go to the park or, I dunno, the mall, around the holidays and there’s a constant cycle of children’s choirs and bands performing  on a random stage in the middle of everything and you have no idea where any of them were from? Hi, that was me. That was the cool thing, though, getting to go out to weird places I never would have seen otherwise. I mean, all the church performances were pretty obviously restricted to church locations: the sanctuary, the fellowship hall, the chapel, somebody ELSE’S sanctuary, and so forth. The strings group, on the other hand, played at weird fancy places like the lobby of this one winery or a resort up in the mountains, though I don’t think either of those were Christmas related. One show that absolutely WAS a holiday thing was this event called the “Festival of Trees,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A whole convention hall in the Georgia World Congress Center full of Christmas tree displays and other various holiday gimmickry. I think the deal was that local businesses would provide the trees and decorate them, and at the end they trees would be auctioned for charity or something. I didn’t care about any of that, of course, I just loved being able to run around this giant room full of Christmas decorations and do all the corny holiday arts and crafts stuff. In fact, I think we’ve STILL got a few crudely-painted wooden ornaments we made at the Festival of Trees. Most of the other Christmas concerts we played were at, like, libraries or other churches, but that sprawling sea of novelty trees is still one of the cooler holiday memories from my childhood. I got to see a gingerbread house decorated by the oldies radio station I listened too! It was a Christmas miracle!

Now, all this stuff I’ve talked about so far is just from grade school, we moved from Atlanta out to middle of nowhere North Carolina when I was 13. As a result, I suddenly didn’t have AS much to around Christmas, but my folks still made sure to keep us all busy. We were still in various homechooler groups, and while it was a bit of a drive, they still had the obligatory holiday group parties too. And while the sudden shift from “megachurch in downtown” to “tiny little country church” meant I definitely wasn’t doing a thousand separate projects all at once across December anymore, there was still your stereotypical small-scale Christmas concert that all the kids got wrapped up in. What really stands out to me, though, is the cello stuff. Even without classes to go to any more, Mom still kept us all practicing, and would “book” us to play at various parties and holiday shindigs just to we’d have something to work towards. We’d inevitably wind up playing a set of Christmas songs while people came in before a sermon one Sunday, or as background music for some parent’s group get together or something like that. It wasn’t anywhere near as fancy as the stuff I took part in back in Atlanta, but it was about as close as I’ll ever come to being a touring musician, so that’s still kind of neat. Eventually we did move closer to civilization, and I wound up in a bigger church with a much more active music/arts crew… but by that point I was getting ready for college, and that’s way less nostalgic than snot-nosed child memories. There IS one Christmas memory from after we moved again that’s worth talking about, but it’s so stereotypically “true meaning of Christmas” that I absolutely HAVE to save it for last.

For you see, speaking of “true meaning of whatever,” I haven’t even broached the topic of out FAMILY get togethers at Christmas. Yes, somewhere between all the choir performances and cello recitals and giving bags of pumpkin bread and spice tea to each and every Sunday school teacher, we actually DID find time for a big ol’ stereotypical extended family Christmas gathering. And I do mean stereotypical, right down to the “driving out to the country” part. Both Mom and Dad’s folks still lived about an hour south of Atlanta, and to dumb little suburbanite me, it really felt like the boonies. Most of Mom’s extended family was spread out enough that their half of the Christmas visiting mostly consisted of a single afternoon at the Grandparents house, especially after the OTHER Grandparents moved back to Georgia from being missionaries. All of Dad’s brothers still lived around Georgia at the time, so that side of the family was always a MASSIVE swarm of cousins scrambling all over the place every holiday. So much so that when built a new house, it was literally custom designed to fit as much family as possible. This house with two permanent residents had FIVE guest rooms, the whole lower floor basically existing as lodging for visitors. I have a TON of great memories of heading down there and spending the night and messing around in the woods and seeing various cousins and actually getting to watch Toonami because THEIR SATELLITE TV GOT CARTOON NETWORK BUT OUR CABLE PROVIDER DIDN’T *ahem* but I digress.

I said before that all those church group things meant we got to go do stuff we normally wouldn’t ever get a chance to, and it’s true that most of the big family get togethers were “make your own fun” kinds of events. There was one big exception, though: Callaway Gardens’ Fantasy In Lights. Callaway Gardens is this big golf resort/outdoor nature thing in Pine Mountain, and every Christmas they do a MASSIVE ride-through light display. While we didn’t do it every single year, we still went enough times for Fantasy In Lights to reign as one of my favorite Christmas activities. We’d stuff a van full of around a dozen cousins (they charged by the vehicle), spend a cramped drive telling stupid jokes, and then gawk at some absolutely MASSIVE light displays. I actually just went back for the first time in years, as was surprised that little baby me hadn’t misremembered how big some of these monstrous light towers actually were. The two big nutcrackers were taller than most houses. There was usually some degree of craft and souvenir fair on site as well, the kind of thing where normally I’d end up playing cello one night, and maybe part of the fun was the fact this was about the only time I got to go to a holiday attraction like this and NOT work (I have a feeling that the extended relations may have helped cover the tickets).

But then again, Christmas lights in general have always been one of my favorite parts of the whole holiday experience. Remember, we don’t get snow down here in The South. Lights are the only Christmas aesthetic we have. Even when there wasn’t an entrance fee and twenty other people in the car and lit up arches like if Jurassic Park were in Vegas, I always loved riding around to look at Christmas decorations. Just Mom, Dad, us kids, and some tapes of Christmas music, aimlessly wandering around neighborhoods much nicer than ours, looking at all the fancy light displays. Most Atlanta natives have a disproportionate number of their childhood memories set in their parents’ car, but in this case it’s not just because of how bad traffic can be. I really do cherish those memories of getting mildly lost in some strange subdivision looking at the lights. And keep in mind, this was before the plague that is inflatable decorations or projectors. Even the objectively lame decorations still looked fairly decent. I could probably have done a whole blog post just on Christmas Light Opinions, but I’ll spare you all… for now. The point is, going looking for lights is probably my favorite non-work Christmas tradition from childhood. In fact, that’s one of the few traditions that’s really held consistently throughout all the places my family’s lived, and I could even do to a certain extent while up in DC. I wasn’t driving, obviously, but there were still plenty of big rich people houses decked out with glamorous light displays that I could go wander by on the occasional night where I wasn’t too exhausted to stand. Heck, the Smithsonian Zoo even had a big walkthrough light show! It was blandly generic, sure (they didn’t even play the “holiday” card, it was just animal shapes, ‘cos zoo), but it was still something I could do to tap into a little bit of home.

However, I really DO need to give a special shout out to something we only ever did once, so it doesn’t really constitute a “tradition.” Still, I can’t gush about Christmas decorations and not mention the one time my family visited Biltmore Estate. You know that big giant European-looking house built in Ashville by one of the Vanderbilts that’s been in a bunch of movies? I always remember it as Richie Rich’s house, though I’m sure there’s plenty of other entries on its filmography it’d prefer I mentioned instead. The point is, we took a family trip up to the mountains one weekend, and took one of the tours of the place. And even though it wasn’t even thanksgiving yet, they already had the whole place decked out for Christmas. And I do mean DECKED OUT. There were candles and garlands and wreaths and at least one tree in every single room and musicians all over the dang place. Seriously, every single room had folks on violin or harpsichord or guitar or zither or SOMETHING playing Christmas music. Nine year old me traveled a decade forward in time to be jealous we never played cello in THIS place. It’s funny, my Mom was the one who wanted to go, and even apologized to me for how bored she assumed I would be. But no, I frickin’ loved that place, and it’s arguably my new gold standard for all-encompassing Christmas sensory overload. It didn’t have the corny charm of Fantasy in Lights, sure, but the inherent classiness of the proceedings made for a unique experience unto itself.  I think I'd have to visit Disneyland while their holiday overlays are up to match this level of concentrated Christmas assault.

Oh, but then there’s the bit I was saving got the end. Trust me, this is the sort of thing even a Hallmark movie would reject for being too on the nose. Not too long after we’d moved closer to the seminary where Dad was teaching, so around the tail end of high school for me, us kids got rounded up on Christmas afternoon to run an errand. If there was any build up to this, I totally missed it. Suddenly we were all piling into the van with bags and bags full of clothes. See, the seminary has a sort of in-house Goodwill where students can drop off stuff for others to take, and Mom was one of the main people involved with running operations there, so I was vaguely used to hauling piles of clothes from one point to another. Doing this particular chore on Christmas day was a bit odd, but whatever. It didn’t fully click until we were already en route that this particular run wasn’t to take the school’s overflow to some other local charity drop off, but actually making a delivery to a student’s home. Turned out this one guy and his family had recently moved all the way from Africa to come to the seminary, and this whole van full of clothes and things was for them. It further didn’t sink in until we got there, and the kids started flipping out over just how MANY bags there were, that they’d basically left everything they had back home and came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs. These kids were just bowled over at how much we were dropping off. So, yeah, even at the time I was conscious of what a “puts everything in perspective” moment it was, and that only hits me harder now. I wish Past Me had paid more attention so that I could tell the story in greater detail, because this would be a fantastic point to compare and contrast whatever crap I got that morning to the hardcore doing of good deeds that went down that afternoon. But then, the fact that I can’t remember the rest says a lot by itself. Running that one errand really did turn out to be one of the most hardcore True Meaning of Christmas events that has ever happened to me. Helping the less fortunate, kindness to strangers, and dude was even a preacher! This had ALL the bases covered! How could I not close with that story? The heartwarming soundtrack plays itself!

But seriously, that has been one of the most consistent trends of pretty much every “Christmas Tradition” I’ve been a part of since I was a kid: doing something for others. I joke about getting to eat junk food at parties and looking at pretty lights and all that, but I still feel like the base of it all was a foundation of unselfishness, of service. Doing things for the benefit of those around me rather than expecting things for my own benefit, be it a van full of clothes or a night of entertainment or just bringing a plate of cookies to share with the rest of the room. At a time of year so often decried for breeding selfishness, I think that’s a pretty good habit to have picked up.

And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.