Only Communists Buy Fake Trees

Thanksgiving - my family must quote lines from the movie While You Were Sleeping while eating the meal, although I'm not sure why. What began as a humorous conversation ended as an annual compulsion, so much so that visitors mistake it for our own conversation. It goes something like this:

"These potatoes are so creamy."
"Mary mashed them."
"John Wayne was tall."
"Dustin Hoffman was not tall."
"I didn't say he was tall."
"Seven bow ties, I bet!"
"Who the hell is Uncle Al?"

If you've seen the movie, you'll notice that these are in no particular order. Which doesn't matter, actually, since we quickly move on to Close Encounters due to the large mound of mashed potatoes that someone has inevitably shaped into the alien mountain at the end of the film.

House Rule: It is a criminal act to listen to Christmas music, buy a tree, or decorate before Thanksgiving. If we are visiting a department store and happen to hear carols before the turkey is served, we are inevitably offended. It wasn't our decision: it's how we were raised.

A Second Rule: Christmas trees must be real (despite the fact that they give my mother a rash if she touches them - we might feel bad if she wasn't the one insisting on the smell of fresh spruce). We felt like traitors the first year we visited Home Depot to buy our tree (as opposed to driving to the usual Christmas Tree Farm and searching the hills for the perfect shape). They may be real trees, but they don't ever look exactly right when they're from a hardware store. They're lopsided - a true Charlie Brown in various stages of depletion.

We love decorating our tree, but not because we actually like our ornaments and find them endearing. On the contrary, they are an odd assortment of ugly articles that we have an unnatural attachment to; they make us laugh. The tree just wouldn't look right if it didn't have those naked angel butts (gifts).

Our Nativity Set is a collection of painted ceramic pieces with missing heads. We refuse to discard it. We like our memories, intact or otherwise.

We watch the same Christmas movies every year - Home Alone, The Santa Clause, Holiday Inn, Christmas on 34th Street, While You Were Sleeping, and various other films that have nothing to do with Christmas yet somehow made it on the list. We also listen to the same old records (actually vinyl) - Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, to name a few. This is my favorite part of the holiday.

. . . What are your holiday traditions?