Getting to Know You

I had a little fun in December asking my friends about some of their favorite Christmas traditions, movies, songs, etc. I felt it's only fair to share my own answers.

1. What is your favorite funny Christmas movie?
Elf

2. What is your favorite sentimental Christmas movie?
I'm quickly becoming a fan of the foreign (Finland) movie "Christmas Story" that shares the history of St. Nicholas.

3. What is your favorite animated Christmas movie?
 A Year Without a Santa Claus (and I'm missing my copy...just in case you ever need a gift idea!)

4. What is your favorite Christmas candy?
 My grandmother's English Toffee

5. What is your favorite Christmas cookie?
 Soft sugar cookies with frosting

6. What is your favorite Christmas hymn?
Hark the Herald Angels Sing (the verse that says "mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die" pretty much sums up the gospel)
 
7. What is your favorite secular Christmas song?  
"Baby, It's Cold Outside"

8. What is your favorite line from a Christmas movie?
 "The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear!"

9. What is your favorite song from a Christmas movie?
The Heat Miser song from "Year Without a Santa Claus"
 
10. What is your favorite Christmas scent?
Fresh cut Christmas tree
 
11. What is your favorite Christmas gift you received as a child (besides a Baby?)
My life-size Raggedy Ann doll
 
12. Do you have a strange or unusual Christmas tradition?
We find a night to surprise our girls after they've gone to bed, make hot cocoa, get dressed in our pajamas and go on a "Pajama Run" - looking at Christmas lights, counting nativities and talking about how Jesus is the Light of the World.
 
13. What is your favorite childhood Christmas memory?
 Going home from the candlelight service at church and seeing the flashing red light at the top of a radio tower and thinking it was Rudolph. I would hurry my dad to get home so I could be in bed before Santa. It never dawned on me that same light flashed the other 364 nights of the year.

14. What is your favorite Christmas gift you received as an adult (besides a Baby?) 
Our first married Christmas was my first Christmas to not go home. I was dreadfully homesick. My parents sent us a Douglas Fir from a tree farm in Oregon via UPS so I could have a little bit of Oregon in my apartment in Nebraska.

15. What is your best Christmas memory as an adult?
When one of my nieces pulled off the surprise of all surprises and got her sister home from Maine to Oregon for Christmas. Watching the look on my sister's face when she saw her daughter and realized all of the details that went in to pulling off this surprise.

16. Christmas trees - real or artificial?
Being an Oregonian through and through, I can't fathom ever getting an artificial tree. I'm half thinking about getting a Douglas Fir sent via UPS again one of these years.

17. When do you start listening to Christmas music?
As a music teacher, it never really ends...preparations always begin in the summer, or even before. But willingly listening to Christmas music? Probably a week or so before Thanksgiving...but only in the car where no one else can give me a hard time about it.

18. What's for Christmas dinner?
This year we were invited to have prime rib at the home of a friend's parents. I got to make the pies!

19. How do you do most of your Christmas shopping?
In bits and pieces online or on my way home from work. I do enjoy getting out at least once and seeing the hustle and bustle at a busy shopping center or mall. It feels so festive to me. Call me crazy...

20. When do you open your gifts?
The girls open one gift on Christmas Eve (usually pajamas), and the rest come Christmas morning after we've read the Christmas story from the Bible.

21. How often do you send Christmas greetings?
Every year

22. What color of outdoor Christmas lights do you like best?
I love crisp, straight white lights, as well as illuminated wreaths and trees on a front porch. I also love red and white lights that remind me of candy canes. Not a fan of crooked lights or shaggy looking icicles.

23. What color of lights are on your tree?
Red globes and white fairy lights. Again...a huge fan of red and white at Christmas.

24. If you could revisit any Christmas from your past, which would you choose?
When I was five, my grandparents came to Oregon from Nebraska. My cousins and I put on a play - The Three Bears meet 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. I also had a major part in my Kindergarten play. It was a very fun year.