These are the things that I did to celebrate various holidays growing up, and what I'm inclined to think of as normal for those holidays. (This is partly in response to questions like "Did you open presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas day?" which I've seen people talk about sometimes, and various other things I've seen/heard people say in various places.)
(I wanted to have this done in time for Christmas, but I didn't; at least I'm posting this on some holiday.)
(I started this as "holidays I celebrate" before deciding to only talk about my childhood, so some tenses might be weird.)
Contents
General information
- I've lived all my life in the USA, so the holidays I celebrate are ones celebrated there.
- I've been an atheist my whole life, and was not raised Christian, but I do celebrate Easter and Christmas. The version of those holidays that I celebrate mostly de-emphasizes the religious aspects of those holidays (with one exception relating to Christmas music). In particular, I haven't gone to church on those days; in fact, I don't think I've been to a church service in my life (unless maybe some wedding(s) and/or memorial services/funerals count).
- I don't celebrate holidays for non-Christian religions.
- More generally, I usually think of the things done on the holiday and images used as more important than the (real or alleged) historic event or idea they're celebrating. For instance, to me, Fourth of July is about fireworks more than it is about American independence, and Easter is more about bunnies and Easter egg hunts than it is about the supposed resurrection of Christ or even rebirth in general. I think this is partly due to how I'm inclined to see holidays, but also I think that the traditions I grew up with didn't put that much emphasis on it (e.g. nativity scenes and plays about the birth of Jesus weren't part of my family's Christmas tradition).
- My intuition for when holiday seasons start (before which it feels too early to put up decorations etc., not that I can really do much about it if people put up decorations early) is generally the first of the month containing the holiday (except for Easter, since that moves around).
- In order of most likely that someone will decorate for the holiday to least likely (among people who celebrate all of these holidays), my expectation is Christmas > Halloween > Easter > Valentine's Day > Thanksgiving. My immediate family generally decorated some for Christmas and Halloween, but not usually other holidays.
Things that tended not to be part of holidays for me
- Things involving watching TV or movies generally weren't a big part of holiday traditions for me. (I generally haven't been a big TV-watcher. Not zero, but not a lot.) Like, there have been holiday-related movies I've seen at some point, but I don't think it's ever been a regular thing for me.
- I also haven't seen that many parades in my life; that was never a big part of any holiday for me, normally.
- Also more generally, not many holiday events involving people outside my family or class at school (only things I can think of are some fireworks shows on Fourth of July and trick-or-treating; also I think there have been occasions when we've gone to restaurants, which would involve interacting with waiters and being around other customers who aren't in the family).
- I think Christmas was the only holiday I've associated with any particular music (and kind of New Year's, with Auld Lang Syne).
- Obviously as a kid I didn't drink, but also I still don't. There have been other people in my family who have drunk on holidays, though I didn't really pay attention to it (so I don't remember which holidays involved drinking). I don't remember usually noticing people acting drunk.
Family
- For holidays that involve visiting my family, "family" generally meant my grandparents (when they were alive), their descendants, and spouses of anyone in my family. (In particular, when people marry, my expectation is that spouses will attend each other's family events, but families of spouses don't; that is, the families don't combine to make one big family.)
- I have aunts and uncles on both sides of my family. Also, all of my siblings are half-siblings, and they're all way older than me; now they're all married and have kids, but even when I was super young some of my siblings on my dad's side had kids, so growing up, my dad's side of the family was three generations.
- There have always been a significant number of people on both sides of my family who have lived close enough to visit for a day.
Combined, these mean that, growing up, for holidays that involved visiting family (at least Thanksgiving and Christmas), I've generally gone to two different events, one for each side of the family. The ones for my dad's side of the family have generally been larger, both because there are just more people who meet that criteria, and also I think they sometimes invite either more distant family members or friends of family or something (I don't always know everyone who attends those).
Easter
Usually me and my mom would color Easter eggs (real eggs) together by dipping them into water with food coloring in it (generally red (pinkish), yellow, green, and blue). This generally resulted in either solid-colored eggs, or half one color half another, or sometimes simple rainbow or sunset patterns (maybe a few other things). At some point I found out that if you drew on the shells with crayons then the coloring wouldn't stick to that part, and drew designs on some of them, but just food coloring has always been more common.- When I was young, me and my mom would have Easter egg hunts at our house in the back yard with the eggs we'd colored, where she would hide eggs for me to find and then I would hide eggs for her to find. (Later in life, there were Easter egg hunts for other kids in my family that I was there for, at other people's houses, and I don't remember this switching-roles thing being a part of those. I think those Easter egg hunts often involved a mix of plastic eggs with things inside and real eggs, whereas the ones me and my mom did were only real eggs.)
- Rabbits, the species, have always been associated with Easter for me, but there was never a specific individual "The Easter Bunny" or any claims of rabbits doing anything other than what they normally do. The newspaper comics often had The Easter Bunny bringing candy to the kids, but we never had that tradition in our family, and I don't remember there being any pretense of eggs in Easter egg hunts (mine or other kids in my family's) being hidden by anyone other than people in my family. The main bunny-related tradition we had was sometimes I would eat chocolate Easter bunnies.
- I don't remember getting together with family or having a big meal being a part of Easter when I was young, though we did start having Easter meals with family at some point. (It's possible that we did have big meals with family when I was young and I just forgot; maybe the eggs just stuck out to me more in my memory.)
My mom would often make hot cross buns (round sweet bread things that have currants and frosting in the shape of an X on top). I think when there were chocolate eggs they were usually just plain chocolate; I don't think I had a Cadbury cream egg or a peanut butter egg until much later in life. Not sure I've ever had any marshmallow peeps.- I've never celebrated/observed any of the things leading up to Easter (Mardi Gras, Lent, Good Friday, etc.) and didn't know about them as a kid. Also we don't get Easter Monday off here.
Halloween
- I went trick-or-treating until my parents said I was too old. The costumes I remember wearing weren't really scary (I remember going as a strawberry poison dart frog one year, and an original iMac another year).
- I remember being told at some point that the reason it was called "trick or treating" was that if you don't get a treat you're supposed to play a trick on someone (so that's something I knew), but I don't remember ever actually seeing or hearing about anyone playing any tricks (I also don't remember there ever being issues with people denying candy). To me "trick or treat" was mostly just an arbitrary thing you said to get candy.
- We typically got pumpkins and carved them.
- I don't think I've ever been to a Halloween party.
Christmas
I celebrate Christmas, even though it doesn't have any religious significance to me.
Tree and decorations
Usually we got a flocked tree (real tree with white stuff on it), and put it in the front hall. We had ornaments of various colors and shapes that we put on it (I think different in different years), as well as lights.- The colors of Christmas lights I grew up with (both for the tree and outdoors) were red, yellow (I think a bit orangish), green, and blue. I don't think of that combination of colors as Christmas colors (that would just be red and green, maybe white); rather, the tradition is to have multicolored lights, and that's just the default multicolor combination. This means that I have less of an attachment to the specific combination of colors than I might otherwise have. Later in life we've had different colors of lights (including in the picture on the right; I couldn't find a picture with four-colored lights).
- When I was young, the lights on the tree could be set to blink in various patterns (my favorite being "slow fade", where one color is on at a time and then fades into another color after a few seconds).
- I've always had the mental image of a Christmas tree having a star on top of it, but we've mostly used an abstract shiny pointy thing.
Santa
- My mom used to tell me that Santa existed, but I don't remember ever believing it (and at one point I thought of various ways to prove that he doesn't exist, like hiding a camera in my stocking and somehow making it trigger at the right time, though I never actually followed through with that). I never stayed up to try to see Santa, and I don't remember my parents ever trying to plant any sort of evidence of Santa's existence other than the presents.
- I don't remember putting out milk and cookies ever being a thing we did.
- Santa typically put stuff in my stocking (often Hershey's Hugs), and maybe some small presents around the tree, while the bigger, more important presents were from my parents.
- While I've always understood giving bad kids coal as part of the story of Santa, I don't remember ever actually getting coal in my stocking. I also don't remember trying to be extra good around Christmas, or for that matter being reminded a lot to be extra good; I think I mostly thought of the coal thing as kind of an empty threat (Santa's too nice to actually give anyone coal), part of the story but not part of the actual practice. (Also, Elf on the Shelf didn't even exist yet when I was young; anyone claiming it's any sort of old tradition is lying, and the whole thing seems kind of creepy and counter to the spirit of Christmas to me.)
Presents
- As mentioned previously, when I was growing up, I would usually go to two family gatherings, one for my dad's side of the family, and one for my mom's side; usually at least one of these would be a day or two before or after Christmas. At these gatherings, I'd usually open the presents that I got from the people at that particular gathering (aside from people I lived with), even if it wasn't yet Christmas. (This means that if one of the gatherings was Christmas Eve, then I'd open some presents then, but otherwise I didn't have any tradition of opening presents on Christmas Eve.)
- On Christmas day I opened presents from Santa, my parents, and anyone who we didn't see at any family gathering. The most important present to me was usually some sort of electronic device from my parents.
- Usually each household gave each person a present (or maybe two).
- For gatherings on my mom's side, usually one person would be designated as "Santa" and distribute all of the presents people brought to everyone there. (I think we also sometimes did that for birthdays.)
- Comics sometimes joked about characters having super-long Christmas lists, seeming to imply that they're greedy. That never really made sense to me, since I've always thought of Christmas lists as being an "any of these" thing rather than an "all of these" thing (I've generally assumed the number of presents one gets is determined only by the number of family members one has), so a long Christmas list to me would mean someone doesn't care what they get. (Usually there wasn't more than one or two things I wanted, so I usually didn't bother making a list.)
Music
- Examples of songs I think of as Christmas songs: "We Wish you a Merry Christmas", "12 Days of Christmas", "Silent Night", "Oh Christmas Tree", "The First Noel", "Joy to the World", "Jingle Bells", "Little Town of Bethlehem", "Angels we have Heard on High", "Deck the Halls", "Away in a Manger", "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", "Frosty the Snowman". (I'm mostly just reading off of an xkcdsw I made a while back; I made that because I felt the original wasn't representative of what I think of as Christmas music.)
- This is the one exception I mentioned to de-emphasizing the religious aspects, since many of these songs are explicitly about Jesus.
- I think of all of the songs I mentioned as "Christmas songs" or "Christmas carols"; I don't think of, say, the newer ones as a different sort of song from the older ones, or think of any of them as hymns or anything like that.
- The songs that I think of as Christmas songs are ones that I learned from hearing other people I know (probably mostly my mom) singing them (including the ones new enough to have been recorded when they were written). I also heard my mom play them on the piano a lot when I was young. I think I have some feeling that professionally-sung recorded music isn't really Christmassy.
- I've heard of the tradition of door-to-door carollers, but I don't remember ever experiencing it myself.
New Year's Eve
- There was at least one year (2000) when we had a big family thing for New Year's.
- I don't think fireworks were usually part of New Year's for me (though I knew that they were for some people, and I think I've heard neighbors setting them off sometimes).
- I don't think I knew about the ball dropping thing until much later in life, and didn't see video of it until even later (and it wasn't what I expected; I was surprised it dropped slowly).
- I've known of "Auld Lang Syne" as a New Year's song for a long time, but I don't think I've usually heard people sing it on New Year's.
- I don't remember ever making New Year's resolutions or being told that I should make them, though I knew that they were a thing some people did.
Birthdays
- Usually birthday parties I've been to (both for myself and for other people) have been with family, usually at someone's house, although for my birthday sometimes we went to a restaurant that I liked.
- In elementary school, we'd sometimes have in-class celebrations for me and my classmates' birthdays.
- I've always thought of the standard birthday food as cake, and sometimes birthdays would have cake. For my own birthdays, I usually got cupcakes (since I liked those), and some birthdays on my mom's side of the family had pie. I don't think I've ever had (or been to a party that had) ice cream cake, though I'd seen them advertised.
- I don't think games were ever a big part of birthday parties for me.
- Surprise parties were never really a thing I did growing up, and the idea doesn't really appeal to me.
Other holidays
Groundhog Day: I knew, since I was super young, of the claim that groundhogs check on this day if they can see their shadow, and if they can, it's 6 more weeks of winter. I don't think I've ever done anything for this day, other than like, notice it was happening. I don't think I was aware of Punxsutawney Phil until I was way older (I understood the myth to be about all groundhogs, not one specific individual).
Valentine's Day: Up to around sixth grade, the expectation was that we would give valentines to everyone in our class, which was what I did. After that I completely stopped giving out valentines. Some people still gave valentines in high school, but after that I don't think I got valentines either.
St. Patrick's Day: I was aware of the tradition of pinching people who don't wear green on this day, but I don't remember whether I ever participated (in wearing green or pinching people). I think at some point in grade school the teacher said something about shamrocks. That's pretty much the extent of what I've usually done for this day. I don't think I was aware of the "drove the snakes out of Ireland" thing until I was way older.
April Fools Day: April Fools Day for me was pretty much always about saying false things, rather than physical pranks. I remember at some point when I was young just saying a bunch of obviously-false statements and then "April fools!" after each one, all in a row (the only one I can remember now is "Apple is spelled A-P-L-E. Apple fools!"). I don't think I got that you were supposed to actually try to fool people into thinking things were true. For me, April Fools was all day, not just in the morning.
Holidays I celebrated but haven't written anything about here (yet?): Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, Independence Day/Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving
Holidays that were just no-school days, where I didn't do anything to celebrate them: Memorial Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Presidents Day, MLK Day
Holidays I didn't celebrate: Cinco De Mayo, Juneteenth (didn't know it existed), Earth Day and Arbor Day (maybe they talked about one or both of those in school at some point?), May Day (I think they talked about this is school one year, maybe I did something that year?)