Christmas Time :)

Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love spending time with my extended family. On Christmas Eve we have a party with my dad’s side of the family. We’re very Italian, so there is tons of pasta and delicious treats. My favorite food is the lasagna my aunt makes. It is so cheesy and has lots of garlic—yum! Every year my grandma wears this sparkly Santa pin; and every year, she tells us the “Santa Pin Story”. This pin is my grandma’s absolute favorite. It shines, sparkles and glimmers. She pinned it onto a sweater, and wore it a party once. When she came home she flipped the sweater inside out and put it on a hook behind her door. The next morning, she realized her pin was gone! She searched everywhere and called the hosts of the party and told them to search too. She was so depressed she lost her pin, she wrote into the newspaper, asking them to write a column about her missing pin. By the end of the week, her pin was still missing. While doing laundry, she flipped her sweater right-side-in again, and there, still shining on the right shoulder—was her Santa pin. She tells the story with such dramatic effect every year, sometimes I forget the ending even though I’ve heard the story a thousand times.
Christmas day we stay home all day in our pajamas, and watch 24 hours of A Christmas Story. It gets kind of annoying by late evening though, so we end up watching a movie we got from Santa.
On my mom’s side of the family we get together usually two days after Christmas at my grandma’s house. I also have a very large family on that side too. Every year we do Secret-Santa. Each cousin draws a name and they buy a present for them. One of my uncle’s always dresses up as Santa—even though we all know who it is—and passes out gifts. It’s funny because my grandma even makes the adults sit on his lap to get their present. The most prominent tradition though, is the annual card game of Spoons. Everyone sits at this long table and we play a giant game. It gets pretty intense, and sometimes people fall off chairs, or walk away bleeding. It’s all in good fun though—no one seriously gets hurt.