Christmas Reflective Essay

English Comp 1
20 September 2013
Christmas Decorating A tradition is like playing the lottery. When you do it once, you will do it over and over again. Christmas is always a big deal in my family! We all throw a little extra hustle and bustle into the holiday season.
Every Christmas season starts with me getting down the decorations from the attic. There are so many boxes to take down and it seems like the number of boxes grows every year. After taking down the multiple boxes of decorations from the attic my sister and my mom begin to decorate. They start with the garland all around the windows seals and doorways of the house. They then begin to put lights up in every corner of the house. Next my mom puts up her favorite decorations, the nativity sets. She has three different sets. Two glass sets that she bought when my sister and I were born and one that her grandmother gave her when she was a teenager. My mom absolutely loved these decorations and always loved setting them up.
After the nativity sets comes my mother’s Santa collection. This is by far my favorite decoration, besides the tree of course. She had collected them over the years and they are actually pretty neat. The collection is made up of multiple glass Santa’s dressed up in different costumes as the different cultures around the world imagine Santa. While we in the United States imagine Santa with his red suit, kids in Germany in the 1930’s imagined him dressed in a red cloak. It is pretty neat to see how the image of Santa changed throughout the years in all the different countries. Next comes the part that the entire family helps with, the Christmas tree. We all do our part in some way. Usually my mother and my sister take all the pieces of the giant seven foot, white frosted tree out of the box and try to put it together. They set the bottom half up and my father and I do the top since they are too small to reach up that high. Once the tree is set up we start wrapping it with lights from bottom to top. Our tree is always filled with colorful bright lights. We then start putting on all the ornaments. Even though they don’t match, my mom loves to put the ones we made when we were in Kindergarten. Now that the entire tree is up and decorated it is time to put the tree topper on. Our tree topper is a white star with a red light in the middle. It looks so nice on top of the tree and adds such a neat look it.
Now that the house is decorated we go throughout the holiday season until it is time for my sister and mom put all the decorations back into the boxes and for my dad and I to carry them one by one to the attic. Even though it’s a lot of work it’s something we love doing. It’s a tradition that we will keep doing, even if my mom isn’t here to help us anymore. Like I said before, a tradition is like playing the lottery.