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Every Thanksgiving and Christmas.

 

But Thanksgiving is my favorite.

 

We all get together at my grandparents,

basically my dad's aunts, uncles,

 

cousins, my cousins, my aunts and uncles

all get together.

 

We all bring food.

 

We all spend time together.

 

Everybody has their kids there.

 

All the kids are playing.

 

Everybody's talking, having a good time.

 

And I and that's why

I enjoy Thanksgiving the most,

 

because of all the food and family

that's there.

 

The holiday tradition

 

kind of changed a couple of years ago

when I bought my my house in LeClair.

 

And so I started the tradition

of having my parents

 

and my 101 year

old grandma over for a meal

 

and we just hang out

and listen to grandma’s stories.

 

And usually after we have a meal,

we're all a little sleepy.

 

And so we turn on football

 

and we watch football

and all of us usually end up asleep.

 

And last year I'm pretty sure even the cat

fell asleep on the couch with all of us.

 

It's a good time.

 

Christmas Eve, my mom

hides spiders in the Christmas tree.

 

A lot of people do hide the pickle,

so we always do

 

the spiders that my mom makes by hand,

and we take turns.

 

We have 30-second rounds

trying to find a spider,

 

and then it's kind of fast

paced and aggressive.

 

But when you find a spider,

everybody celebrates and you get to pick

 

a wrapped gift card for somewhere

 

or a wrapped board game,

you know, of some sort.

 

So we always fight over trying

to find the spider in the tree every year.

 

So I have two holiday traditions.

 

The first one is every year on Christmas

Eve, my mom gives us new pajamas.

 

It's always one of our favorite things

 

because who doesn't like to sleep in

nice, cozy new pajamas on Christmas?

 

And then it's fun

to kind of look back at the ones

 

now that we've stopped growing.

The second one is

we get ornaments every year.

 

So this is a tradition

that my husband's family has done

 

ever since his mom and dad got together.

 

So they've got ornaments on their trees

from like the early nineties

 

all the way up to now.

So it's really nice to see

like their ornament

 

they got each other

when they first got married,

 

when they first had Jake's sister,

when they first had Jake.

And now like as their grandparents.

 

My heritage is Hungarian and also Irish.

 

So super duper

superstitious at New Year's,

 

once it hit midnight,

we would all go outside.

 

We would all just start

hitting our pots and pans, because

 

 

apparently it was to help relieve you

 

from bad spirits for the next year

 

and shoot off fireworks

and just be as loud as you can.

 

I will go over to my mom's house

and we bake from like 6 a.m.

 

till 7 p.m. from sugar cookies

to peanut butter squares.

 

Anything you can think of.

 

And we'll put them in little tins,

 

and then we take them around to,

like our neighbors, to family, friends.

 

And it's just something we've done

since I was little.

 

And it's fun to see, like,

the smiles on everybody else's faces.

 

So I think traditions are important

to people

 

because it's something

that they can do generationally

 

and then it's something unique

to their family, too.

 

So this tradition isn't something that

you can be like, Oh, I was raised in Iowa.

 

This is what all the islands do

so that you can be like, No,

 

I am a Turner,

I am a Dylan, I am a Kershaw.

 

And this is what we do.

And that's kind of our fun tradition

that we do in our family.

You're gathering together around

something that you all can focus on,

 

and I think that that is something

that we all need.

 

I think it's just the people

you're doing it with.

 

And so I don't always spend a lot of time

with my parents and my grandparents

 

because all of our lives are so busy

and so it's nice to just

 

relax and slow down and have some time

to talk about the little things.

 

Just to be together

 

and enjoy that time together

because we know that our time is limited

and we don't get to do that

every day of the year.

 

I just like spending time with my mom.

 

It's a lot of fun

to go over to her house and,

 

you know, just make a mess of everything

and then just get to spend the quality

time.

 

We get to play our Christmas music

 

and just be spend the whole day

with each other.

 

As we all know, memories need to be made

because we don't last forever. So finding something

that we can make memories and have share

with our children and pass on to them,

I think it's just something special.