CHARLIE GARNER
Opinion Editor
avg6206@psu.edu

As I am getting older, I am becoming so much more appreciative of my family’s traditions for different holidays, especially those of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The night before Thanksgiving, my siblings and I all helped my mom make pies. She usually makes five pies (four pumpkin and one cherry), and we all take turns rolling out the crusts and placing them in each of the pie pans. Thanksgiving Eve is also always a pizza night for us since it is, obviously, a big cooking day the next day. We also try to scramble and finish our Christmas lists before Black Friday shopping. The morning of Thanksgiving, my mom gets up early to start cooking while she has the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade playing in the background on the TV. She has it on until my dad gets up and turns it off because he hates it. Also, when my dad wakes up, we get one of the pumpkin pies from the fridge, and my dad cuts it and gives one piece to each of us, and we have pumpkin pie for breakfast. For the rest of the day, before the food is ready, we lounge around in our pajamas and watch “Dutch,” which is a Thanksgiving movie, or we watch random Christmas movies. After dinner, the siblings help each other put the food away and wash the dishes and we used to go Black Friday shopping later in the night, but now we go the next day.

My family just started a new Christmas Eve tradition just last year. We call it “Dipmas,” and it is basically just a dinner where we have various types of dips that my mom makes. My sister and I do PowerPoints or Kahoot! games just for fun activities to do as a family. Then we all put on matching Christmas pajamas and my siblings and I all have a sleepover in one of our bedrooms. We do not wake up to open gifts super early. We usually do not get up until 10-11 AM. When it is time to go downstairs to open our presents, we all line up by age, and we go downstairs one by one while my Pap or my mom takes pictures of each of us in our pajamas. It is pretty much a chill day after that, and we have ham and cheesy potatoes for dinner.

My family’s holiday traditions may not seem that exciting to other people, but to me, they are some of my favorite memories with them, and they are what I look forward to all year.