What are your Christmas Eve and Christmas traditions?

yankee bedroom set image

Meg

In my family we either go to my house or my aunt's and uncle's. It's only my mom's side of the family. We take turns doing it. This year it will be my house. They're aren't that many kids. It's only me, my cousin CJ(14), and my cousin Leo(13). My dad always sets up a train about a week ot two before. This train is really cool. He puts it on this huge table. Then we put a ton of little buildings and houses on. There's a fire station with fire men and fire trucks and there's a grocery store and many more. They're all old. There's little people that can ride it the train cars. There's a lot of different train cars each with sliding doors for the tiny people to get it. The train goes around the little "city" on it's train tracks. It can even go backwards. Ever since we were little my cousins and I always play with the train on Christmas eve. My mom sets out bowls of M&Ms, Hershey kisses, and mixed nuts in little Christmas dishes. My dad and I always try to eat them before the guests arrive and my mom would yell at us. My mom lights Christmas scented Yankee candles and we turn on Christmas music. When all the adults arrive they sit and talk in the living room. My cousins and I either hang it the family room or go to my room and turn on the Christmas music and dance around(yeah, we only did that when we were younger). My mom usually serves ham for dinner. The adults sit in the dining room and my cousins and I sit at the kitchen table and talk. We used to talk about how excited we were for Santa, and if we would see his sleigh in the sky. Now it's just what we want for Christmas. After dinner my aunts help my mom clean up while we beg for presents. When we were younger we used to ask every 10 seconds. When it's time for presents, me and my cousins go first. We only open presents from our aunts and uncles, and our grandma. Then the adults do this gift thingy where each person brings a $20 unisex gift and the youngest adult picks a gift first. Each gift is wrapped. When they chose their gift they unwrap it. The next person picks their gift and they can take another person's gift if they want to. It goes on and my cousins and I get bored so we go in the other room and talk. When we were younger we used to put the Santa tracker on. We'd have it on the TV and the computer and always wonder why it showed him in different places(now we look back on that and laugh). Then all of us gather around the tree and sing a Christmas carol and enjoy the time we have as a family. Then my cousins and I watch a Christmas movie in the family room. We say our good-byes and thank-yous and hug many times. After everyone gone I used to sprinkle reindeer food outside on the ground. We got the recipe offline. It was made out of oats, sugar, Christmas sprinkles, and glitter so they could see it. I used to love to do that. I come inside and hug my parents and say goodnight. Then my parents would tuck me in and close my door. Now I stay up a little later watching Christmas movies. Then I say goodnight and I love you to my parents and go to bed.

I usually wake up at 7:00. I stay in my room and look at my stocking that my parents filled me. I keep my stocking at the side of my bed because we don't have a fireplace. I take each item out one by one and look at each. Then at 7:30 I wake my parents up with a "Merry Christmas!". I've done that every year since I was little. When I was younger my parents when downstairs first while I sit at the top step. I can't see the presents from there. My parents would ooh and aah over what "Santa" got me because he never wrapped it. Then they took what seemed like forever to make their coffee and get the camera. I'd come down the stairs and scream while my parents took pictures and smiled. Now I come down the stairs with them and open my presents. My parents open their stockings that they filled for each other. My half-brother and half-sister come over(half siblings are not step sibs, they're my dads children from his last marriage) at 11:00am. They're in their twenties so I don't see them that much. They open their presents and say thank you. We hang out and I mess around with my presents while my parents open theirs. We have Christmas music on the whole day. We pretty much stay in our PJ's the whole day and just relax and hang out with our family. We play Wii and I try to beat my brother. Last year my sister got a magnetic Jets dart board so we were trying to beat each other in darts. We skip lunch and have a big dinner. My mom makes turkey. I'm picky so I just eat the turkey, corn, and Pillsbury crescent rolls. An hour later we have dessert. Dessert is usually pie and ice cream, and Christmas cookies. My brother and sister leave and we just chill.

Thats how my family celebrates Christmas. How does yours?
(It doesn't need to be as detailed)

Answer
Ooohhh, I love these questions! :) Seeing as how I really enjoyed reading all about your's, as the detail you went into shows how much you like it, I'll do the same, then we can both be stupidly excited! :) I'm feeling festive at the moment because in the village I live all the decorations are slowly going up, and I've been getting mine ready :)
On Christmas Eve, I normally wake up earlier than usual, simply because I'm excited about all the excitement! :) I spend the first few hours of the day wandering, walking outside in the mist and cold, and watching Christmas TV shows and movies (Usually the Polar Express or The Santa Clause :) ), and generally not knowing what to do with myself! Then after lunch I go up to my bedroom, where I turn on Christmas music and start to tidy it and clean in (I know that sounds wierd lol, but it keeps me occupied, and it's kind of relaxing, nice and warm inside, with Jingle Bells playing!). I always go overboard with the decorations in my room, I like it to be perfect for the night (about the only time in the year when it's actually clean lol...).
At 5pm or 6pm is when the fun bit starts. Every year I can remember, at 5-6pm we, as a family, have left to go on the long drive to visit friends and relatives. It's really exciting, and the drive time is actually really fun because you get to see so many decorations.
First, we visit my grand-parents. I barely see them, so it's really nice on Christmas Eve to visit them sit in their house for about an hour drinking Coke and watching the clock out of the corner of my eye. It's just the atmosphere, y'know? Just sitting there, in the warm, with the TV on in the corner of your eye, waiting among the decorations.... There's nothing particularly fun about it, it's just the excitement slowly building up that makes it so fun :)
Secondly, we go to my aunt's house. She is the one relative I see often, but it's always nice to see her on Christmas Eve. Normally, my brother and I get dragged upstairs by our cousin to play with his train set or try to spot Santa through his bedroom window. She always stuffs our faces with chocolate and Lemonade lol, and I love sitting with my Uncle watching old Doctor Who episodes, as has become our little tradition at Christmas lol. At about 7, we leave her house, and go to our final stop.
We visit my god-mother and her husband, Mik. I only see them at this time every year, so it always feels so Christmasy just seeing their house, let alone seeing all the decorations Mik goes overboard in putting up. They always give us drinks and mince-pies, and for some reason they always have Shreck on TV lol, but it's all become part of the atmosphere.
Mik is a gardener and a technichian, and, the best part about this is that... he can actually build snow machines! On Christmas Eve he always has the garden covered in about a foot of snow, soon after arriving he always takes me and my brother outside for a buge snowball fight and snowman building :)
Afterwards we go back in to warm up, this being about 9pm, and this is the best part of Chirstmas Eve for me, sitting watching Shreck the Halls, eating chocolate and drinking Coke, in front of a warm fire, knowing soon we're going to have to go because it'll be time to go to bed for Christmas!
We leave their house at about 9pm - 9:30, and the drive back is always really exictable for me and my brother. If it's open, we have a McDonald's for dinner, but if it's not my mum cooks toasties when we get home. Me and my brother both have a quick bath, new PJs, and in bed for 11pm. I love this bit, because the exictement is unbearable, and my room looks amasing lit up with all the decorations. Really cosy, and it's nice to have a clean room for once lol :)
Always have trouble getting to sleep lol...
I normally wake up about 8 in the morning, I'd get up earlier but I'm usually so tired from last night. I love seeing my stocking hanging on my bed, full to bursting! When my brother wakes up we take our stockings into our parents room to open, normally full of little things, like chocolate and key-chains etc. After that the real fun starts when we go downstairs and open the presents under the tree! I love going into the living room to see them just sitting there, piles of them! Normally takes a few hours for them all to be opened, then the rest of the day is spend watching TV and using the Christmas haul! I always save a few for Boxing Day just to prolong the excitement though...

I'm 16 and I still don't tire of that routine lol, and I'll probably keep doing it, going back to my parents' every Christmas until I'm 25 and have my own family! The best part of Christams for me is the rounds of Chistmas Eve, they're not as fun as Christmas Day, but the excitement is brilliant! :)

The Innocent Man by John Grisham?

Bob S

i read the book a while back and about to do a project on it and i am a little fuzzy on all the details so if you could please help me out a bit all answers appreciated and 10 pts for best.

Answer
I got this from Wikipedia -

The story begins with Ron Williamson, who has returned to his hometown after failed attempts at playing for various minor league baseball teams, including the Oakland A's and the Ft. Lauderdale Yankees. This failure leads to a bout of depression, which results in a drinking problem.

Very early in the morning of December 8, 1982, the body of Debra Sue Carter, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress at the Coachlight Club (located in Ada), and a resident of Ada, was found in the bedroom of her garage apartment. She had been beaten, raped and suffocated. After five years of false starts and shoddy police work by the Ada police, Williamson—along with his "drinking buddy", Dennis Fritz—was charged, tried and convicted of the rape and murder charges in 1987-1988. Williamson was sentenced to death. Fritz, meanwhile, was given a life sentence. Fritz's own wife had been murdered seven years earlier in 1975 and he was raising his only daughter when arrested.

Grisham's book describes the aggressive and misguided mission of the Ada police to solve Carter's murder mystery. Forced dream confessions, unreliable witnesses and flimsy evidence were used to convict Williamson and Fritz. Since a death row conviction automatically sets in motion a series of appeals, a fresh look into the details of the trial, especially by the Innocence Project and Williamson's attorney, Mark Barrett, exposed several glaring lacunae in the prosecution's case and the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. Brady v. Maryland, a case that had been ignored until after the sentencing, was acknowledged. A retrial was ordered by Frank H. Seay, a U.S. District Court judge. After suffering through a conviction and 11 years on death row, Williamson and Fritz were finally exonerated by DNA evidence, and released on April 15, 1999. (At the time, Williamson became the 80th inmate exonerated from Death Row since 1973.[2])

Ron Williamson suffered deep and irreversible psychological scars during his incarceration and eventual wait on death row. (At one time on September 19, 1994, he was only five days away from being executed when the execution was stayed by the court.[3][4]) He was intermittently treated for manic depression, personality disorders, alcoholism and mild schizophrenia. It was later proven that he was indeed mentally ill (and hence unfit to be either tried or placed on death row in the first place). The State of Oklahoma and Ada and Pontotoc County officials never admitted any errors, even threatening to re-arrest him, though they did settle a wrongful-conviction case brought as a result of Williamson's incarceration.


Another criminal from Ada, Glen Gore, was eventually convicted of the original crime on June 24, 2003, and was sentenced to death at first, [4] but his death sentence was overturned in August 2005;[5] he was eventually convicted at his second trial in June 2006 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.[6][7]

Williamson and Fritz sued and won a large settlement ($500,000.00) in 2003 from the City of Ada, and an out of court settlement with the State of Oklahoma for an undisclosed amount. By 2004, Williamson was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and died soon thereafter on December 4, 2004 in a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, nursing home. Dennis Fritz, meanwhile, returned to Kansas City, where he lives with his daughter, Elizabeth as of 2006[update]. In 2006, Fritz went on to publish his own account of being wrongly convicted in his book titled Journey toward Justice, ISBN 1-931643-95-4.

The story also includes accounts (as sub plots) of the false conviction, trial and sentencing of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot in the abduction and purported murder of Denice Haraway, as well as the false conviction of Greg Wilhoit in the rape and murder of his estranged wife, Kathy. All the men were, at one point of time, incarcerated in the same death row. About two decades before Grisham's book, Ward and Fontenot's wrongful convictions were detailed in a book published in 1987 called The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer.

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Title Post: What are your Christmas Eve and Christmas traditions?
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