The then sprint comes – sometime around the 22^nd my significant other & I spend 3 action packed days visiting 3 families in 2 states. We consume too much food & too much booze & I bake so many cookies that our gas bill goes up 30% in December. We collapse every New Year’s Day & swear that the next year things we will spend less energy & money on the holidays… and every October we start to make our lists anew.

My family always does Christmas in a big way, ok in a HUGE way.  Trees go up right after Thanksgiving & don’t come down until New Year’s. It may sound shallow, but a lot of it is about presents.  We love to give them, we love to get them. We all still have stockings & Santa has a gift under the tree for each of us, we also each get gifts from the various family pets. Yep. The PETS.  

However, nothing could have prepared us for what happened 3 Christmases ago. My brother & his wife were pregnant.  Even before my nephew came into the world there were Christmas presents for him under the tree. This year (he’s 20 months old) he had to take several naps & breaks – the number of gifts he had to open was that exhausting. And FUN. We’ve always had a great time at Christmas, but it’d been a while since we had Christmas with a kid. The sheer joy of all of it is overwhelming. Next year will be even better – we all know it. This year he understood presents… next year he’ll understand Santa.

He father is big on traditions, so there will be lots of firsts that we will repeat well into the holidays when he is coming home to visit from college.  There will be advent calendars, midnight mass, nativity scenes, and of course more cookies. Serious cookies.

There will also be music – music at church, music at home, music in the shops & in New York it’s even in the streets:  Carols, Anthems, Hymns & of course Popular Music from the Great American Songbook, as well as some from countries near & far. Our family’s musical taste goes from Country to Rap to Classical. The number of Christmas albums out there is staggering, the great ones become as much of family traditions as the ornaments we take out year after year.

So, the question becomes… what Christmas traditions do I want to bring to light with this Christmas album? I can firmly say one that involves children. After all, isn’t that where Christmas really began?