What is your Christmas tradition? 

    The very first Christmas Eve as a family, my mother took 5 of us kids to St. Mary’s Catholic Church for a Christmas Eve service without any help from dad. It was also the last time she took all of us kids to a Christmas Eve service, I believe. 

    TRADITION: the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. 

    Usually Christmas is the time to do just that too. 

    When my mother was growing up, one of her Christmas tradition was, the family would eat lutefisk for Christmas dinner and oyster stew for New Years. 

    Is there anyone who still eats lutefisk anymore? Or is it gone like the older generation? 

    I’m so glad that my mother never made us kids eat lutefisk; because it was gross. It looked like snot. It was slimy and it stunk. Now my folks ate lutefisk, but us kids didn’t. Thank God!!

    Our family Christmas tradition will be followed in this blog. The meal consists of a ham dinner; or should I say a feast. My mother would get up quite early to prepare the meal. She would fixed ham and turkey, since our family was so big; and the ham would go quicker than the turkey. She would stuffed the turkey and made stuffing from scratch. She even cooked the gizzards. She would baked pies, like pumpkin and apple. She didn’t baked much cookies though.

    My dad would wait until the day before Christmas Eve to finally get a tree for us to decorate. Then finally, my mother grew tired of bitching for him to get a tree; she eventually bought an artificial tree. 

    One year, my mother fixed goose for Christmas. The goose was given to the family. 

    She would also have lefse every Christmas. It was Carl’s Lefse because it was way better than Freddy’s Lefsa; and I’m not being bias since I grew up on a farm south of Hawley. 

    We would have oyster stew for News Year as the tradition from her family growing up. 

     She would have a bowl of nuts sitting out with a nutcracker. It was a variety of nuts too.

     We would celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve; so that the older kids could spend Christmas Day with their spouse’s family. My dad would hand out the Christmas gifts until my younger sister and I were old enough to take over the duty. For some reason, that didn’t get pass down from the older kids to us. Eventually, we passed it down to the older niece and nephew for them to pass out the gifts. 

    Since our family was big and the meal was buffet style, we would dished our food up and go sit wherever we wanted. 

     My mother also made mock crab salad and baked beans. 

     One year we celebrated New Years Eve with my older sister’s in-laws, and it was the last time too. 

    One of the tradition I took from my mother was baking Christmas cookies for Christmas. Then when she passed away, I ended up making her famous baked beans for dad for Christmas. It was hard because she never wrote down the recipe; so I had to tweaked it a little. I felt that he should at least have his baked beans since mom wasn’t around anymore. I believed that he appreciated it too. 

    The only time my folks would go to church was for Christmas, Easter, wedding, a funeral, or a special occasion; but made sure they sent us kids to Sunday School and church. 

    Another tradition was drinking egg nog. Except we drank the non-alcoholic kind. Some would put alcohol in their egg nog. There is a tradition at Park Christian School, in which the high school students would have an egg nog drinking contest every year. Some of them don’t even care for the taste of egg nog. It has an acquired taste. 

    We would eat pickled herrings also for Christmas. We would even buy it for dad for Christmas. There was even a time, my mother would pickled northerns that dad would catch iced fishing. 

    Another thing us kids would buy dad for Christmas was chocolate covered cherries. He loved them! 

    This was my family Christmas tradition, some carried over from the tradition my mother had growing up in Casselton. She was very big on family get togethers. Believe me, there was some members of the family you didn’t want to be around either. 

    What was your Christmas tradition once again? 

    I wish you a Merry Christmas from my family to yours.