I’m always fascinated by what people remember of the Christmas traditions of their youth. There are as many traditions as there are families. Some observances may be similar across families, but the beauty of each account is in the individual details, sometimes remembered with different emphasis by members of the same family.

On the morning of Christmas Eve there would usually be some kind of baking or candy-making going on. The main event of our ‘official’ observances was going to my Grandparents home. I don’t really remember the hour-drive to Upland, I think I may have been under the hypnotic spell of Christmas anticipation.

My grandmother (on my mother’s side) would prepare a gift bag for every member of the family (a tradition my mother tried to keep going until our family grew far too large).  The bags would have some special thing in them (one year it was my first wind-and-shoot 35mm camera) and a number of things that today you might find at a party or dollar store. The little trinkets were not so easy to come by in the 70s and early-80s and my grandma spent the entire year gathering things for these treat bags. Truly, it was one of the great highlights of the day and gave us wild kids something to focus on until everyone had arrived.

Of course there would be food, but the main event, for me at least, was our family talent show. Each year I’d showcase something I’d been working on. Sometimes it would be great and other times I’d completely embarrass myself. I played the bassoon, the tuba, duets on pennywhistle with my father. Some of my cousins would sing things like “Jingle Bell Rock” or “Grandma Got Ran Over by a Reindeer.” I’d never even heard these songs at the time, my father was strictly a ‘classical and jazz’ kind of guy. Some of these Christmas pop songs have grown on me since then and some still make me cringe.

After everyone had gotten ’showing off’ out of our blood, we would sing carols. This was my father’s favorite part. It was his one chance each year to use the classical guitar skills that he slowly improved each evening as we sat in front of the TV watching Buck Rogers, re-runs of Star Trek, Family Ties and The Cosby Show. This nightly practice was a constant irritation to my mother, but as a little kid it was just background noise. Perhaps my easy ability to tune out the guitar accounts for why I now have such difficulty paying attention to anything that is being said to me when the TV is on. Anyway, that was my father’s essence . . . it wasn’t enough to sit and watch TV, and now I appreciate his attitude much more. Still, when it came to the carol singing, he could go a little far and after about the fifteenth carol I would start to itch for presents. Now that is the part I remember the least, just a faint image of paper flying everywhere and mass confusion.

As if that wasn’t enough for a Christmas Eve, on our way home we would stop to see the life-sized Nativity and scenes from the Savior’s life that Upland displayed on its main street. I loved this. I adored driving around this display each year.

Finally, we would head home. We would play our favorite freeway game, where we each tried to get from A to Z first by calling out signs you could see from the freeway (once someone called a letter from a word, no one else could use it). Some of us very nearly had all the signs memorized.

Christmas Eve was ‘officially’ over. When I was young, my parents would place my sleeping body in my bed. When I got older, the unofficial Christmas Eve traditions began . . .