december blog carnival

Since I am updating...

I missed the first blog carnival for december, so I'm going to get a head start for the second one. The blog topic is:
1. Christmas traditions & recipes- Share Christmas traditions or your favorite holiday recipe.


Now - I love Christmas time. I really do. Last night Adam and I went out and picked up a christmas tree, and hung lights on the front of the house. I'm thrilled with it. Picking out a christmas tree was one of the best family traditions that we did with my Grandma. We'd get all dressed up in those cheap drugstore gloves and wear scarves the one time a year we ever wore them (we live in Southern California), and run around a christmas tree lot pretending to be Laura Ingall's and drinking hot cider.

The reason it was so exciting was that we didn't have a christmas tree at my house. My parents are Baha'i' - so we didn't celebrate christmas with our immediate family. We did christmas at my grandma's with the extended family, and all my life I have loved having the best of both worlds.

My family did celebrate a winter holiday though - called Shabiyalda. This is celebrated on the longest night of the year, and is so full of winter traditions I don't even know where to start. We start the evening off by covering up the tv with some sort of cloth, so that we aren't even tempted to turn it on. My dad puts on Iranian music on the cd player (there is one song with my name in it, so I am always begging for that) and my mom puts all of the little snack foods in her pink glass bowls. We eat so much that night - I guess that's a tradition for most holidays. The big ticket item is roasting potatoes in the fireplace. Yum yum yum. Those always take so long that they're kind of our midnight snack. Oh - that was the other neat thing about Shabiyalda, at least when we were younger - the idea was to stay up as late as you possibly could. We'd drag all of the blankets and pillows to the living room and fall asleep one at a time while my dad read Persian folk tales. The older I get, the earlier I fall asleep.

It's one of my favorite nights of the year. It's one of those traditions that can be celebrated with no religion involved - just for the wonderment of being warm, inside with family, on a long winter night.