Christmas Traditions

This is our first Christmas on our own, away from our families.  And, even though we'd both like to see them all, there have been a lot of good things about having this time just to ourselves.

We've been able to start thinking about what traditions we want to have for our own separate little family.  And so, even though we don't know which ones will stick in the long run, it seems as if everything we've done for Christmas this year has an extra special significance as "the first time we..."

It was the first time we got a bunch of real live mistletoe and hung it in our kitchen.  It was the first time we decided how to decorate a Christmas tree (with small souvenirs from our travels around the world).  It was the first time we made plates of cookies for our own neighbors.  It was the first time that Paul started reading each stave of The Christmas Carol leading up to Christmas Eve, with just us listening.  

I wonder how German culture will affect our family traditions now, since our "first times" for so many of these things happened here.  

All different styles of the glowing  Bethlehem stars
so popular here.

For example, we have a frozen, butchered duck in our freezer right now because we want to make a traditional German poultry dish on Christmas day (goose or duck)--and I think it would be nice to do the same thing every year.  

We put treats (or a bouquet of flowers in my case) in each other's shoes on St. Nicholas' Day on December 6--and I think it would be fun to celebrate it every year now. 

It would be fun to make kartoffelpuffers every year as a treat (big, flattened tater tots with applesauce), because that was my favorite thing to eat at the Christmas Market here.  

I want to light candles for each Advent--something that was practically unheard of in my Mormon childhood, and have candles in my windows and a glowing German star-of-Bethlehem hanging on my porch.

I'm sure we'll keep a lot of the things our families would do themselves for Christmas, but I'm really happy that we have so many more things to add now from our experiences here in the Christmas-Celebration-Mecca (hahh...that sounds funny) that's called Germany.