My family does none of this. My father, ever the cautious fire fighter, insists we wait until the week before Christmas to get our tree, so it won't burn our house down if it gets too dry. We do not open gifts on Christmas Eve (mostly because we're at church for 17 hours, but that's besides the point). No paper chains, no advent calendars, no snowy walks through the forest.
We have Mr. Lazy, the Donald Duck head, and the Cory Band.
Mr. Lazy is the star that tops our Christmas tree. My parents got him at an ornament exchange almost twenty years ago. The idea of the exchange was to bring a beautiful, lovely Christmas ornament. My father opened his present and saw this, in ornament form:
Shockingly, no one stole Mr. Lazy and my father ended up bringing him home. He is the first ornament to go on the tree and the last to come off. No ornament can be higher than Mr. Lazy. No ornament is as sacred as Mr. Lazy.
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| The sacred moment of hanging Mr. Lazy on the tree. |
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| Mr. Lazy in all his glory. |
The second ornament to be hung on the tree is the Donald Duck head. My dad found Donald Duck in a toilet at Disneyland in 1999. He thought Donald would be a great addition to our Christmas tree, so he brought him home, much to my mother's chagrin. She ran him through the dishwasher several times before he was allowed to go on the tree. Strangely, Donald seems to disappear every year as we undecorate, and it's very difficult to find him the next year. One year he was hiding in the Singing Kittens toy. One year he was in the garbage can, but my father and I rescued him.
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| You can see Mr. Lazy's bottom at the top of the picture. No one can go higher than Mr. Lazy. |
The Cory Band is our favorite tradition...and perhaps the most sacred. This tradition has been in our family as long as I can remember. In the early 1980s, my parents heard a song on the infamous Northwest radio station KEZX. They were very intrigued by this fascinating song. Nearly a decade later, in the early 1990s, KMTT began playing the song at Christmas time, and my parents declared it as the song of Christmas.
It has become our Christmas tradition. We cannot begin to celebrate Christmas until we all hear the song on the radio, at the same time, in the same place. It did not count when I was in a parking garage in Seattle and almost caused a major accident when the song came on and I called my parents screaming. It did not count when my dad called from work to let us know he had heard it. It apparently did not count when I called the radio station, asked when it would next be played, and had the station cued up on the radio.
If you are not familiar with the best Christmas song of all time, please enjoy "Stop the Cavalry" by the Cory Band. And have a very merry Christmas.
(The history of this amazing song.)
