Holiday Traditions

It's a bit late, okay it's VERY late, but here it is, my post about some of our holiday traditions.  You might not remember, but way back in November I said we were going to try out some new traditions this year and I'd let you know how they worked out.

Now, I forgot to take pictures for the post, so you'll have to make do with the measly one I have up, but maybe I'll do better this year.  Or maybe not.  I still haven't mailed last year's Christmas cards so no one hold their breath over anything.  Especially anything involving me & holidays.

So, there was one tradition my kids wanted to do, one tradition that happened kind of accidentally, and one tradition that I wanted to do.

First, when we were reading about Christmas we learned that in Russia they make 12 dishes for the 12 Apostles.  My kids wanted to do something similar, and since we are not Christian I had to do a bit of thinking to figure out how we wanted to do this.  So, we made 8 dishes for the gods Odin, Frigga, Freyja, Od, Thor, Sif, Freyr, & Idunn.  It was WAY more cooking than I was used to.  Also, we did this for Thanksgiving, not Yule.  I had intended to do it again for Yule but then we went out of town for Christmas day and I didn't want a lot of leftovers sitting in the refrigerator rotting away.  (It was also the first Thanksgiving meal I had ever cooked, when they were really little I never bothered and as they got older we went to my sister-in-law's for it.)

This was followed by the "accidental" tradition.  Optimus Prime wanted to go on a picnic.  I explained to him that people don't go on picnics in autumn/winter, and he'd have to wait until next year for us to go on one.  He was pretty bummed out over this and then an idea struck me.  We could have an indoor picnic the day after Thanksgiving while we put up the tree.  So we did.  The kids were thrilled and loved every minute of it.  I also made an apple pie (my first!) and saved it for the day after so we could have it with our picnic.

So, we had our picnic, put up our tree and decorated it, and then I had my kids go get their helmets.  We don't do stockings, we do viking helmets.  No, this is not a pagan tradition, this was me and my husband being funny the previous Yule.  You see, both Odin & Santa leave presents in our house, so of course we needed viking helmets.  When we had bought the helmets for them we had intended for them to replace stockings.  However, this past year my kids realized that they were missing out on stockings (even though they have helmets) so plans had to be tweaked a bit.  This brings us to the final tradition we started this year.  We put the helmets under the tree the day after Thanksgiving and Odin comes and leaves them a few things.  This year he gave them each a new stuffed dog dressed as Santa (getting a new stuffed animal each Christmas was a tradition in my family when I was a little girl, so this is a crossover of that), a few chapter books for each of them, and a stack of books all wrapped up.  The stack of books was a new book for each night, to count down the days until Santa came.

We even have an Odin tree topper.  It's a Santa in a white suit, but we call him Odin.

So, three new traditions spread out over 2 holidays.  We haven't started any new traditions this year yet (actually, we kind of skipped over our first holiday of the year because I was so worried about Valentine's day), but we're planning on.