Christmas Time in Hollis, Queens

I would first like to start this post off with something to set the mood of this post.

When I was growing up, my family was always really big into Christmas. My mom had one of those "NOW That's What I Call Christmas" type CDs she would always play as we were decorating. Every year, in fact multiple times a year, it would go from Bing Crosby to this song and she would start dancing and singing to it. My mom dancing to Run DMC...one of my favorite Christmas traditions.

Anyway, when it was time for us to start decorating for Christmas, we took ourselves to the Christmas Pirate store and picked up a few things. We held off on doing all of the actual decorating until the day after Thanksgiving.

Starting Point

Final Product

We had our plant guy, Robert, deliver a tree to us along with some poinsettias. We knew it was coming about a week in advance and we made our minds up that we were going to have our tree stand and be prepared. Nope! We went to five different stores and couldn't find one. After talking to a few locals, we heard a lot of "we don't do that here" kind of stuff. When asked what they do instead, we kept hearing "we just put it in a bucket." Well Saturday morning was here and we didn't know where this thing was going to go. Robert and his son carried it up our stairs, and low and behold, he had a bucket and some rocks. Apparently that's how you stabilize the tree in Ecuador. We arranged for him to pick it up when January rolled around and he was off.

We made one more last minute trip to get a llama blanket to use as a tree skirt, and picked up a few more ornaments and came back to decorate. Yes, of course we listened to Christmas music and Run DMC specifically.

Threading the Floss

After the tree was up, our stockings were hung, and some other stuff set up it came down to putting the ornaments on the tree. One more thing about an Ecuadorian Christmas. They don't use hooks or string for their ornaments. We couldn't find any at any of the stores we visited. Not even Christmas Pirates! Apparently, they take the top off, and pop that sucker on the end of a tree branch. The end. Well, we weren't going to be having any of that.

Shannon got to work on using dental floss to thread through the ornament loops and I strung the lights up and started hanging the ornaments. Our final product looked pretty good!

Next came the last decoration, our family nativity scene. This one requires a bit of explaining, but I'll try to be brief. My family has had the same nativity scene since my grandparents were children. It was this beautiful, hand-carved masterpiece complete with farm houses and some sweet animals. As the years progressed, my uncles and aunts, and of course my mom broke some of them on accident as kids do. Also as kids do, my family would put a new piece there to replace the old one. If a sheep broke, a horse was put in. Eventually the family caught on after enough random animals started showing up and this nativity/Noah's Arc became the tradition. Each year, every family member who was spending the holiday with the family had to make an animal contribution. It could be random, but ideally the animal should represent something from that person or their year. For example, on our first date, Shannon and I came across an injured bat and tried to save him. For her first Christmas with me, she donated a bat.

Yes, that is a hippo and two dinosaurs...

When I moved out as a teenager, my sister rightfully inherited the nativity set and I received

my own as a gift to start my own tradition. Well we set ours up and made our contributions; for me an alpaca for obvious reasons, and for Shannon a tortoise to commemorate our upcoming holiday trip to the Galapagos.

We still have a few more small things to set up, but it was great bringing my family tradition, and some of our holiday spirit to our home as we prepare for the holidays.

All Ready for the Holidays!