Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks. And for Booked for the Holidays,” too!

The prompt for today is:

What was Christmas like at school when you were growing up? Were there parties, programs or other activities? Did students exchange gifts? Did you have a part in a Christmas play? Did teachers decorate their rooms? Was it permissible to refer to the holiday as Christmas? If you attended church, what special things did your church do? Were you or your family involved in any of those programs, cantatas, or activities? Have you ever gone caroling? Did your parents ever host Christmas parties?

I almost sat this one out because I don’t remember many particulars about Christmas celebrations at school when I was young. I know we had them the last day of school before Christmas break, and I know girls brought gifts for girls and boys for boys, without any name tags as to who they were from. The only concrete memory is that one year I received chocolate covered cherries — and I cried.  I love chocolate, but that form of it has always seemed gross to me. And somehow the teacher came up with something else for me — perhaps she had a few gifts stashed away in case someone forgot to bring one. I don’t remember what it was, though! But it does seem like the parties were lower key than the parties my own kids had while in school where they got a gift from a classmate, something from the teacher, an ornament made by “room moms,” and a bag of candy besides all the goodies at the party. I did enjoy the ornaments, though — some moms from each class would get together and make ornaments for all the kids in that class. I loved the fellowship of doing it together and the creativity, and those were some of my favorite ornaments. But they discontinued it after a while — not enough moms with time to do it, mainly, and some discrepancies — one class would get something made out of empty toilet paper rolls and others would get something really nice and elaborate. Of course, I could have continued making ornaments for my kids each year or we could have made them together — but I just didn’t think of it. I wish I had!

Most everybody referred to Christmas as Christmas. I don’t remember any conversation about not acknowledging it as such.

My parents did not attend church, so my own attendance was spotty, and I can’t remember what was done in regard to church programs, but they must have had them. These days the churches we have attended have a children’s Christmas program, and adult one, usually a cantata, and each Sunday School class or group has some kind of party. I love them, but it makes for a super-busy time, especially when you have children in different grades with all of this plus school Christmas programs and piano recitals, too.

I don’t recall my parents ever having Christmas parties, though I do have a vague memory of attending an office party where my mom worked once. It’s always been so busy in December that it seems you don’t dare add to it by inviting anyone over — it was be just one more event to attend for them. I do kind of regret that, but then, fellowship is fellowship whether at church or at home. What someone ought to do is have a January mid-winter party when it is cold and dreary and nothing else is going on!

I have vague memories of caroling — maybe with a Sunday School class or Girl Scouts.

My husband’s father worked at a grocery store, and on Christmas Eve they’d host the employees at their home for just a short little get-together with some munchies. For many years my mom would send us Swiss Colony packages, and we’d get those out Christmas Eve. Eventually we got to where we just have certain Christmastime munchies around during December but didn’t have a set time or date for setting them all out.

Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks.

The prompt for this week is:

What was Thanksgiving like when you were growing up? What days did you usually have off from school? Do you remember any Thanksgiving activities at school, such as a play or a meal? During the Thanksgiving weekend, did you travel to spend it with relatives or did you stay home? Or did relatives travel to you? What was your family’s day typically like? Did you watch the Macy’s Parade or something else on TV? Have you ever attended a Thanksgiving parade? Was football a big part of the day? And of course, we have to hear what your family ate! Were there any traditional foods that were part of your family’s meal? Which of your growing-up traditions do you do with your family today? And if you are married, how did it go merging your two traditions/expectations?

I think we usually had just Thursday and Friday off from school for the Thanksgiving holidays. I’m glad my kids have gotten out at noon on the Wednesday before for the last several years. I don’t remember having Thanksgiving meals at schools where parents or grandparents were invited. Not to be a killjoy, bit I really don’t like that — it seems to me to take away from the family Thanksgiving. I liked what one of my son’s teachers did one year with just a few snacks, then things like pemmican that the original pilgrims and Indians might have had.

We might have done plays or activities at school, but the only one I remember is tracing around our hands and then coloring and adding features to make it look like a turkey (thumb was the head, the other fingers were feathers.)

I don’t remember traveling or having other relatives travel in for Thanksgiving as a child. That kind of thing took place at Christmas but mostly during the summers when weather was better and people had more time off.

I think we watched parades if they happened to be on when we turned the TV on, but it wasn’t a tradition or a “must-see.” My dad was a football fan, so we probably watched whatever game was on — or maybe only if the Dallas Cowboys were playing, I don’t remember.

We ate the usual Thanksgiving fare: turkey, cornbread dressing (we used the terms “dressing” and “stuffing” interchangeably), mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, some other vegetable side dish, pumpkin and apple pies. I don’t think we ever had cranberry sauce.

When my husband and I first got married and lived near our alma mater, we often had college friends over, and that was fun, especially since they couldn’t get home.It was nice to provide a little slice of homeyness for them. Some years Jim’s former pastor’s family came to town when he had married kids in college, and they often invited us over for Thanksgiving — that provided us with a bit of homeyness!

My family’s Thanksgiving now is much the same. The meal is pretty much the same: we often have a green bean casserole or Vegetable Medley as an additional side. No one likes sweet potatoes except Mittu and me. We might turn on the parades, we might not. We usually eat around 12 or 1, have pies later in the afternoon, then heat up leftovers or make turkey sandwiches in the evening. For years my dear husband has taken care of getting all the meat off the turkey after dinner and then cleaning the roasting pan for me — that helps a lot because I am starting to get wear by that point. I usually get a nap some time in the afternoon. None of us is into football, but we might watch a video that night (planning on Toy Story 3 this year! We’ve all seen it except Jeremy. None of us minds seeing it again, and he wants to see it with us). Sometimes we might play a game.

Sometimes we go around the table saying what we’re thankful for, sometimes not.

This year we will be especially thankful to be all together again after being separated since this summer.

I like that it is a fairly laid-back day except for the big meal. Even though we don’t have a lot of unique traditions, I love the day as a time to think intentionally about thankfulness and a time to relax with family.

In addition, one of the highlights for me of the holiday and the year is that in every church we’ve been in, there has been some kind of praise service at some point during the week. In that particular service often it takes on a retrospective look back at the year, and it a blessed time of rejoicing with those who have had special blessings or or empathizing with those who have experienced answers to prayer and God’s grace in trials. An evening of laughter and tears and reflecting on God’s blessings!

Mocha With Linda hosts a weekly meme called Flashback Friday. She’ll post a question every Thursday, and then Friday we can link our answers up on her site. You can visit her site for more Flashbacks.

The prompt for this week is:

What was Halloween like when you were growing up? Did your family participate? If not, was there a substitute activity? Did your school or church have a fall festival or carnival? Were there stipulations regarding costumes? What sorts of activities did they have? What about Halloween parties? Have you ever bobbed for apples or been on a hayride? What are your memories of “haunted houses”? (I’m not referring to the ultra-scary, secular ones, just the fun kid ones, with bowls of grapes and cold spaghetti!) If you went trick-or-treating, what were the rules, both for trick-or-treating and for candy consumption? What types of costumes did you wear? Were they store-bought or homemade? Did you carve a jack-o-lantern? How are your children’s experiences similar or different to yours? And the most important question: Do you like candy corn? What is your favorite (and least favorite!) Halloween candy?

My family did allow us to trick-or-treat. I can’t remember any of my costumes except I know I wanted to be a princess one year. We usually had store-bought costumes with the plastic face masks, and I can remember the masks getting all sweaty and irritating after a short while. But it was fun to dress up and get candy and wasn’t a terribly big deal.

One cousin did have not so much a haunted house but a creepy scary tour in his garage with low lights, boiled eggs for eyeballs, spaghetti for “guts,” etc, that we were supposed to run our hands through. It was pretty well done for his age and wasn’t scary so much as icky, but one other cousin got pretty shaken up by it. That’s the only thing like that I can remember going to — I had no interest in them as I got older.

I was a teen-ager before I heard of or attended an alternate party — the church I attended had something, but I don’t remember what it was called. It was basically a youth activity with games and food and fall decorations — wholesome, nothing scary, no costumes. I enjoyed it.

As a young wife and mom, I was pretty anti-Halloween. I had become a Christian as a teen-ager, and you can find a lot of reading material about the negative influences and symbolism of Halloween. Naturally I wanted to protect my children from anything evil. Plus the day seemed to stray from just innocent dressing up and gathering candy from neighbors to something darker and gory, and stories sprang up across the country about tainted candy. So I was very surprised when I saw faculty and staff from my Christian college let their kids trick-or-treat on campus in the faulty housing area. Of course, it was probably the safest place in the country to trick-or-treat, but, still, what about all those evil origins?

Well, over the years, after observing what several other Christian families did, I did come to the conclusion that it would be possible to celebrate the day as we did in my childhood, with just an opportunity to dress up and get candy, without endorsing evil. I never did feel comfortable letting my own children trick or treat, but we did give out candy as well as children’s tracts and a little leaflet a family in town published with a phone number kids could call to hear Bible stories. If I had young children today, I would probably let them trick-or-treat just on our street or maybe at a mall or zoo or somewhere like that with an organized candy distribution.I would still feel uncomfortable taking them to total strangers.

One of my close Mom friends did have a fall party several years in a row which I just loved. She purposefully kept it away from the day or week of Halloween for those who had problems with it, but she did ask kids to dress up. She had a theme each year: one year it was storybook or fairy tale characters (Jeremy and Jason were Robin Hood and Little John); another year it was clowns, another it was “what you want to be when you grow up.” She had games and prizes and fall decorations. It was a lot of fun.

One year when we were in GA and were discussing with the Awana leaders whether to have any kind of fall party with the kids, one couple strongly objected: they were so adamantly against Halloween that they were against doing anything at all related to costumes or candy or parties anywhere near the date. But I have no objections at all to alternate activities. In fact, in many missionary stories I read, they came up with alternate activities to some of the pagan or unwholesome ones on purpose to help the Christians who might have been tempted to go back to situations that would have proven a major temptation for them.

The only time I dressed up for Halloween as an adult was when I worked at  a fabric store in a mall and had to work Halloween Day. I made a Raggedy Ann costume and wore the dress (without the pinafore) for many years afterward. My kids used the “hair” for clown costumes.

Working at a fabric shop, it was fun to see what different people came up with.

I do remember bobbing for apples once — I didn’t like it very well (mainly getting water up my nose). Now the unsanitariness of several people putting their mouths (and sometimes noses) in the same tub of water grosses me out. I can remember going on a hayride or two —  it was ok, but I didn’t really see the point. I don’t remember ever carving a jack-o-lantern. I don’t like candy corn. I ate it some as a child and thought it was okay, thought not a favorite, but I can’t stand it now. My favorite candy is Lindt Lindor Truffles, but people don’t usually give those out at Halloween. 🙂 But I like the little fun-size M&Ms, Three Musketeers, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups as well as the Hershey’s Miniatures (except for the dark chocolate ones).

And for a nostalgic visit to some of the old-style candies —