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Ascentra Holiday Traditions
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.
- Team Ascentra

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