Preparing for Christmas-Jessica

Hi there!

This week's theme is Christmas Preparations, so I thought I'd write about how my family celebrates Christmas.

Since we are Ukrainian Catholic, we do things a bit differently.

First of all, our church uses the "old calendar", so we celebrate Christmas on January 7th instead of December 25th.

We also have a lot of fun traditions. Like how on St. Nicholas eve, us kids put out our shoes (and no cheating with more than one pair!) for our parents to hide little presents in.
We always end up waking early the next morning so we can find out what goodies they left for us!
Last year I got a scarf and some hair things, the year before I got a few bits of furniture and some Christmas lights for my dolls house, etc. it changes every year.

We generally get our Christmas tree and decorate it around that time, too, so it lasts until Christmas (we always get a real tree, because it smells nicer).

On Christmas Eve, we all carry the presents out and put them under the tree. We don't tend to put them under before that, because otherwise the little kids tend to "accidentally" rip them open a bit to see what's inside.

Then we'll have a big Christmas feast. My Mum makes lots of traditional Ukrainian Christmas food, like snowball cookies that melt in your mouth, crepes filled with sweet things like apple and berries, or meat ones for dinner, bread rolls shaped like birds and filled with jam with cloves for eyes, and little dumplings filled with bacon, cheese, potato, and/or meat.*

Sometimes we'll go to a special Midnight Church service, but since we moved houses, we don't have a Ukrainian Catholic church nearby anymore, so we probably won't this year, unless our priest comes up to visit.

I really love Christmas, it's probably my favourite time of the year.

How does your family celebrate Christmas?

~Jessica

*These all have Ukrainian names, but I can't spell most of them in English, so I just wrote down what they were.