It’s the most wonderful time of the year! I have many Christmas traditions with my family and friends, and while most of them are nothing unique, I enjoy sharing the specific take my loved ones and I have on classic holiday practices.
Watch Christmas shows
My family and I watch an interesting mix of recent and classic animated Christmas movies each year. The specials we frequently view are as follows:
Recent:
- Merry Madagascar
- Shrek the Halls
- Prep and Landing (Disney+)
Christmas classics:
- A Charlie Brown Christmas (Apple TV)
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
- The Year Without a Santa Claus
- Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (Hulu)
Unfortunately, you can’t find a lot of these on streaming platforms. Your best bet for finding the older ones, in particular, is by waiting for them to be scheduled on live TV (or searching for them on YouTube TV) and recording them.
Listen to chrISTMAS MUSIC
Of course, Christmas isn’t Christmas without some wonderful holiday tunes. Some of my favorite Christmas albums are:
- A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio
- A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra by Frank Sinatra
- The Christmas Song by Nat “King” Cole
- White Christmas by Bing Crosby
- Christmas With The Andrews Sisters by The Andrews Sisters
Bake
I adore baking during the holidays. I love to make, decorate, and devour Christmas cookies with my family and friends. There are several recipes that my family makes every year, including:
Make Gingerbread Houses with friends
The gingerbread house: both the love of my life and the single most frustrating thing that I’ve ever encountered. They’ll make you laugh, and they’ll make you cry; they’ll spread a big Christmas grin across your face, and they’ll make you break down in tears when they inevitably come crashing down, squashing your hopes and dreams. One of my favorite places to acquire these torturous puzzles is the beautiful department store that we all know and love: Target. My past creations (if they may be called that) have included a beach home, a barn (complete with fun barnyard animals, including a cow and sheep), and a ski chalet (which was part of a gingerbread village — duh — that I made with my friends.
Go Ice skating
I am horrible at ice skating. I am the person clutching desperately to the rail, my lifeline, so I don’t fall on the freezing ice for the fiftieth time, but I love to do it with my friends. It’s fun to all link hands with the one friend who’s actually good at ice skating at the front of the line so they can just drag everyone else behind them and travel across the rink together. Beware of the power the leading friend holds, however — they may whip the link around them and release, cruelly sending the helpless friends flying across the ice, left to their own devices. Remember: while ice skating may appear fun and benign, it can be a dangerous game.
Decorate the Christmas tree
Although decorating the Christmas tree is an extremely obvious tradition, and I don’t have any special take on it, it must be included in this list. You know what they say, cliches are cliches for a reason: adorning the Christmas tree with lights, ornaments, and icicles while listening to Christmas music/watching a Christmas movie/show and drinking a cup of hot chocolate is simply a wonderful experience.
Read a new author
I always enjoy reading a new author, or at least an author I don’t frequently read, over Christmas break. I easily get into the habit of reading the same authors, especially over the summer. It’s nice to break the cycle of sameness and branch out with a new author at the end of the year. Last year, I read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls. I had read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in middle school — and I actually loathed it — but I rarely read American literature, and I thought I’d give Steinbeck another try since many people seemed to enjoy the work. I ended up liking the work, and it was interesting to read a new style of writing. I read Agnes Grey because I love Charlotte and Emily BrontĂ« and wanted to sample the work of their lesser-known sister, Anne. Although Agnes Grey does not quite achieve the level of beautiful mastery displayed in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I still thought the work interesting — it provides a deeper insight into the life of a governess, a position in a precarious no-man’s-land between the lower and upper classes. Lastly, Silence of the Girls, a modern iteration of the Trojan War, provided an interesting perspective on the famed ancient tale. If you’re someone who enjoys Greek myths and how they have been adapted through the centuries to comment upon current issues, I’d recommend this novel.
A few of the books I plan on reading this winter:
- Finish reading Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena: words cannot express the beauty of these letters. I started reading them at the very end of summer and have been reading them erratically throughout the semester. (I would sometimes read one or two before my class in the morning as I drank my coffee, which was a great way to begin the day.) I now have only a few left, and I would like to finish them during the winter break.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons: I know I just said that I like to try new authors during the winter and I have already stated that I want to read Kafka, another author I frequently read, but this is the last of Dostoevsky’s “big four” novels (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov) that I haven’t read, and I have decided this winter is the time I will finally read it, so don’t think me inconstant.
- Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: Yay! Finally, a new author! I actually got this book for free courtesy of a TCU English giveaway, and I was extremely excited to find it, as I have been wanting to read Wharton for a long time.
A few works I’d suggest specifically for winter are as follows:
- Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: I’ve already written an entire article about how amazing Jane Eyre is, so I won’t start gushing endlessly now. All you need to know is that I love this novel with all of my heart. This book has to be read when it’s cold.
- Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: another book that simply has to be read when it’s cold; the effect of gothic literature is simply heightened by frigid weather.
- Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: I’m not sure why, but I am convinced that all Russian literature should be read during the winter, even if the book takes place in the summer, like Crime and Punishment.
- William Shakespeare’s King Lear: King Lear and Hamlet are my favorite Shakespeare plays (although I’ve only read about ten in total, so take that opinion with a grain of salt). My reasoning for describing this as a winter-time work lies in its theme of storms; the impact of the play’s drama is simply heightened when you are also experiencing a storm or the cold.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights”: this is a beautiful, heartbreaking short story that I could not recommend more. Although it takes place in the summer (during a Petersburg “white night,” or a day during the several weeks in the Russian summer when the sun does not fully set), I still think of it as a good winter read.
