Does your family do something every year at Christmas time that no one else's family seems to do every year?

Don't worry, you're not weird...you're just, umm, unique. In fact, I think, that's what makes families GREAT. The weirder the better I say! My family has a weird tradition, when we, and when I say "we", I really mean "me"...I hide my singing fish, Billy the Big-Mouth Bass and my singing Christmas tree, aptly named, Douglas Fir around the house. Then when someone comes around a corner, or enters a room...it's motion-detected and it goes off, scaring them half to death! Of course, it's only funny the first 100 times...then it just gets annoying (to them).

The ever-popular "Elf on a Shelf" is once again, all the craze this year. Nowadays, kids have to worry about not touching the elf or it will lose it's magical power, and being "good" because the elf reports back to Santa each night. Very creative stuff there. Back in the day when I was a kid, my mom, (whoops I mean Santa) started a weird family tradition. I got oranges, yes oranges, in my stocking to "pad things out" to make it look over-flowing. Maybe "Santa" was trying to push eating healthy stuff on me. No kid wants fruit for Christmas. To this day, I hate oranges.

I guess there's nothing wrong with doing all the "normal" holiday traditions like decorating the Christmas tree, decorating the house, watching holiday movies, playing Christmas music and sending out cards, those are all great. However, most families have at least one STRANGE Christmas tradition like these:

1. Dressing the cat or dog up in a holiday costume.
2. Follow that up with an Ugly Sweater family photo.
3. Playing "Mario Kart" (or other video games) on Christmas morning.
4. Giving each other ugly ornaments.
5. Camping in the living room on Christmas Eve.
6. Watching horror movies on Christmas Day.
7. Wearing matching Christmas pajamas on Christmas eve and all day Christmas day, Santa hats are optional.
8. Leaving Santa a beer and cookies instead of milk and cookies. (Of course, if Santa pounded a beer at every stop, he probably wouldn't make it back to the North Pole and would be messing up everyone's presents)
9. Wrapping paper fight. After all the presents are unwrapped, we crumple the paper and throw it at each other like a snowball fight.
10. Hold a "white elephant" gift exchange, the more insanely awful the gift the better!
11. This kind of goes with #10, instead of exchanging "regular" gifts, exchange only dumb "As Seen On TV" products, the "cheesier" the better.
12. Add a dill pickle "ornament" to your tree. There's a common tale told of the Christmas pickle, or Weihnachtsgurke, an Old World tradition that started in Germany

Let us know about your strange family Christmas traditions, on this station's Facebook page and we'll share them here!

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