Since I am at my parents' house for a few days, and enjoying relaxing here, I am remembering fun things that we did when we were kids. There were lots of great traditions we had, usually involving lots of extended family. I loved that we got Chicago pizza every Saturday night when we lived there. I loved that we saw lots of family on all of the holidays- something we definitely missed after we moved.
But my favorite tradition was the Stoub family Christmas party. Most of you know that I come from a large extended family. I have 50+ cousins. My mom is one of twelve kids. It was lots of fun to be a part of a family like that. So we would all on the Stoub side(or almost all) go to my grandparents big house for Christmas day and play, play, play with cousins, eat potluck dinner, and open one gift from my grandparents, which was given by a SANTA that they HIRED for the party! How cool is that?! We loved our time getting to sit on Santa's lap. When we were older, we figured out who it was one year-- a man from our church. :-D I remember singing Christmas carols with my cousins Jennifer and Drea. I remember the food was always really good. I remember playing games and hiding in the closets talking with my cousins. There is still a Stoub Christmas party each year, and it is not the same. It was moved to the church, since all of my cousins are getting married and having kids, there is no way we could all fit in one house. It is still really good food, and really fun to get together with my cousins to talk. I wish we could go every year!
My hubby loves my big family too, esp. since he has about 5 cousins. :-D He loves getting to see friends that he's made in my family and hear stories. He thinks having a big family is kinda cool, since he never had that.
Another thing we did in our family was play, "I'm thinking of a relative, whose name starts with..." on road trips. There are a lot of names to go through for each letter! Amanda, Andrea, Alex, Arnie, etc., You can't play that kind of game in a small family!
What are your favorite family traditions from your childhood? I love reading your comments!
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I have always marveled at the size of your family ... such a fun, crazy group of people! :) I would say that Christmas morning for our family was always fun ... the anticipation of what was under the tree. I remember one year I spent a lot of time trying to disguise my gifts to the family by wrapping them strangely and adding extra things to throw off the recipient as to what was inside ... i.e. stuffing a shirt inside a paper towel tube and adding extra packaging to a cassette tape (that's dating me a bit!). And as always there was a lot of good food to eat and tins and tins of cookies. Whew!
ReplyDeleteThose Christmas parties sound like a lot of fun! I love big families! I thought I had married into a big family. My hubby is the youngest of 6 children, but your family puts ours to shame! :)
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for sharing this lovely tradition with me. :)