This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my bun, with a knick knack paddy whack

[hazelchaz]

Our Christmas 2004 pictures are online. Click on colleency's homemade fireplace to see them.

For the first time in I don't know how many years, library_lynn and I were finished with Christmas before New Year's Eve.

Maria's arrangement with her father's side of the family is that she spends Christmas Eve with them, and Christmas Day with her mom, so she's had two Christmases for as long as she can emember.

I have three siblings (a younger brother, and two older sisters). and Lynn has one. And ever since my younger older sister got married [for the first time] in 1982, we (that is, the Badens) have celebrated Christmas on whichever day we could all get together, which might not be Christmas if Elaine and Willie were off visiting Willie's family.

Then my elder older sister got married, so even if Elaine was in town on Christmas Day, Dorothy and Bob might be off in Texas visiting the Bullards. So, we've had a "tradition" of celebrating Christmas late. It's been a running joke that we do it to hit all the after-Christmas sales, and it's certainly been handy to be able to do the xmas shopping in stages. (If you're not the organized kind that keeps an eye open all year for appropriate gifts, that is.)

Well, it's been like that for more than two decades. library_lynn and Maria got to join us; and we also like to meet up with Lynn's sister Lori, so Maria's got four family Christmases to look forward to every year. She gets a little frazzled by the end of it all...

But this past December, the stars aligned, we didn't have a lot of long out-of-town trips to contend with, so Dorothy invited us all to come over on Christmas Day for our Baden-family gift exchange.

This was also the first year that Maria didn't sleep at our house Christmas Eve. So by the time Maria, Lynn and I were up and at the house, we only got through about half of the presents we were giving to each other before we had to dash down to Dorothy's.

Dad had brought a number of DVDs and books to pass on to us, and they went quickly. We put the ham in the oven, we snacked on other goodies, and got down to exchanging presents. The system we use is someone (if anyone has brought a friend, that would be the person to start, or if someone has been newly added to the family that year, otherwise the youngest, i.e. Maria) picks out a present under the tree that's for someone else. That person unwraps it, we all admire it, then that person picks some other gift that's not for themself or the person that just handed them one.

It gives everyone a chance to see everything, and sometimes to surreptitiously swap gifts. And it takes a while. This time it took us just under 6 hours to go through the process.

Later in the week we visited Shawn and Colleen, and stopped by the same day as Andrew and Jennifer. They come down every year to visit Jennifer's mom in Redondo Beach. And on the 30th we went out to my sister-in-law's house. Lori and Bill have a house in Outer Palmdale; Bill's kids Kylie & Zach and Bill's dad were all there, also library_lynn and Lori's mom, and of course myself and Maria. So it was a nice extended-family in a number of directions... Their house has a big backyard (I have house envy again) and I look forward to the next time they have a summer party. In the winter it's a bit chilly for outdoor partying, though.

Speaking of Baden family traditions, last weekend library_lynn and I had our annual St. Patrick's Day party. This year, since Easter comes early, we also made it an Early Easter party and had a traditional Baden family style easter candy hunt. I bought a spiral-cut ham (Hillshire Farms brand), my mom brought home made Corned Beef. Kim Bergdahl brought the veggie tray, Elaine Vander Linden made green deviled eggs and garlic potatoes, someone (Craig and Genny?) brought lemon meringue pie. Maria brought two kinds of chips. If you get invited to one of my parties, you can expect to be fed dinner; you're not obligated to bring something, it's not a potluck party as such, just come and eat.

But that's not the interesting part.

My parents had to contend with raising four kids, the eldest 9 years older than the youngest. So they came up with a system that made sure that the Easter candy hunt festivities were equitable. (We didn't hunt for easter eggs; those were decorated and eaten indoors.) They'd take all of the candy, divide it into equal shares, and put them into several individual baggies marked with different colors of ribbon. They'd "hide" the baggies in the back yard -- but always in plain sight. Nothing was underneath, or behind, or inside something where you couldn't see it when you were standing up.

Then when all was ready, they'd let us loose. I might be looking for the blue ribbon bags, Thomas the green, Elaine the red and Dorothy the gold. Or perhaps some other colors. It didn't really matter, because we'd each end up with matching bags of candy once we'd found everything.

And of course, one of the rules was that if you saw someone else's color ribbon, you left it alone and walked on by -- and you kept quiet about it, too. (Unless they were stuck and frustrated towards the end and needed a clue where to look.)

So that's what I recreated for our Early Easter party. library_lynn and I went shopping (mostly at Target) for an assortment of candy. We bought: Cadbury milk chocolate eggs, Hershey Special Dark chocolate eggs, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup eggs, Cadbury caramel chocolate eggs, and some chocolate cordial cherry eggs (which were flat on one side - not fully egg-shaped). We bought jelly bird eggs (speckled jelly beans), and spice/tangy jelly beans, and Sweet-Tarts in bunny/chick shapes. We had Lindt Milk Chocolate/hazelnut carrots, and black licorice jelly beans, and Swedish Fish and Jelly Babies (which Bill Ellern had donated to the cause after buying them in a LASFS auction). We had macadamia nuts. We also had mixed nuts -- I'd mixed together macadamias, cashews, shelled pistachios, pecans, walnuts and hazelnuts in a big bag, and bagged up some of that. We had marshmallow "Peep" bunnies, and marshmallow "Circus Peanuts" that were in bunny shapes and pastel colors. We had jordan almonds (almonds in a chocolate & hard candy shell in bright colors). (Did you know that Peeps are actually soft if you get them earlier enough?) And finally we bought several six-packs of Hersheys Milk Chocolate bunnies -- because everyone should have the chance to bite the ears off of their chocolate bunny.

Possibly we went overboard on the candy -- we divided it 15 ways (I found 15 different kinds of curly ribbon, including polka-dot) and there were 9 bags each. I think Mom & Dad would do between four and six bags per kid... We hid them in the back yard, and in the house on book shelves in the living room and dining room, in the kitchen, and in Maria's room.

We had about seven kids at the party. (Caitlin, Ariel, Corwin, Makenna, Sam, Tess, Johnathan.) It didn't matter if you came late -- you wouldn't have missed the hunt. I had samples of each color ribbon taped to a card, so the participants would write their name on their sample and take it with them to match up to the ribbons. (Very important, the reds/pinks/magentas were tricky, as were the greens, blues, and purples.) It didn't matter if you were five or ten years older than some of the other kids. Or thirty years older -- some of the adults formed teams and went around looking for candy too. (I didn't want the adults to have to hold back to "let the kids play" so I was glad some of them participated.) I overestimated the number of ribbon colors I needed, but that was okay -- it meant that even for the last team hunting, they had to skip over the ones that were the wrong color.

Our neighbors, Laurie & Tom, were quite impressed by the concept. They do a big easter party with easter egg hunting, with lots of children and cousins and nieces and nephews. We talked about how you could adapt the system using colored plastic eggs - if you get enough colors, you could mix and match solid vs. half-and-half combinations. Blue, blue/yellow, blue/green, blue/red, and so forth. Or you could go further by marking them. (You could also deal with allergies and the like -- if someone can't have chocolate, you make one set that's chocolate-free and make a note of which color combination's been assigned to them.)

... After writing about these Baden family traditions, I'm reminded of two other things: how we celebrate Halloween, and the opinion that the Baden family might constitute our own ethnic group...