When do decorations usually go up and come down? Are there any unique traditions?
Rural Germany. Christmas time still starts in December/1st advent for me, although some houses have wintery decorations up the day they remove the Halloween ones, and the city has made some preparations for the coming Christmas markets today. Christmas markets are where people go buy Glühwein/mulled wine in a Christmassy atmosphere, a hot drink just tastes better in cold weather than in one’s house (we drink it there as well, of course, can’t enjoy Christmas sober).
Advent traditions include an advent wreath, which is still really Christian in nature, and advent calendar, which has become entirely commercialised around toy brands and chocolate.
The gift giving and the first proper look at the tree is done on Christmas Eve’s Evening, after the religious members of the family went to Church. That evening we eat either raclette or hot pot/Chinese fondue, the other meal then a week later at Silvester. We have started to eat a locally sourced Christmas goose on Christmas day recently.
BBQs and the beach here in NZ, much the same as .au.
The shops here have just started to decorate in the last week or so. The first houses are starting to put stuff up. We kick off on Dec 1st when we tane the kids to cut down a tree and then do a advent from then to the 23rd. We do our christmas on the 24th and travel to my mums on the 25th and do christmas lunch/dinner ther and stay for at least her birthday (the 26th). Generally do a BBQ and a ham.
Quebec here. There isn’t much “magic” anymore. Too much too early too soon. It has become pretty much only a cheap commercial stunt.
Some asshole stores annoyingly start decorating early September, most do it in October. And the fucking music blasting non-stop 24/7.
Fuck this shit.
Sweden. Some people are having decorations up already but normal is from advent. Christmas is celebrated the eve of the 24th with dinner and Santa visiting in person. Dinner is commonly a Christmas ham and other regional or family traditional dishes. 25th is a slow day when kids are playing with their new toys and the adults are relaxing after the build up until Christmas eve. The evening of the 25th is quite common for young adults that are visiting their family home in a town where they no longer live to go out to the local bars and get shitfaced with people they used to know, possibly air their teenage grudges or crushes and get in a fight or laid depending on the scenario and outcome.
Another Swede here.
This is all true, though I don’t have personal experience with going out to the bars.
I thought I’d add some personal details and forgotten details:
- Personal - The Christmas baking: Every year in late november to early december, our family gathers to make almond mussels, hard cakes eaten with jam and cream, we use a recipe that is more than a century old and make the almond dough/paste from scratch.
- National - Christmas Donald: every Christmas eve, the entire nation gathers infront of the TV, tuning into the national broadcaster to watch Donald Duck celebrating Christmas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_All_of_Us_to_All_of_You
- Personal - Decorating the tree: My family has allways had this tradition to only bring the Christmas tree inside on the night before Christmas eve as the Christmas ham is cooking, I have heard that this is common, but I don’t know if it is accurate to call it a national tradition… Anyway, we decorate with baubles, lights and other stuff like that, but absolutely no tinsel nor coloured lights, however we do put small baskets with chocolates in them hanging on the branches. An interesting thing is that we in our family has never used glass baubles, that was a rational decision by my mom, she decided on using plastic decorations to avoid us kids getting hurt if we broke one, so when we drop a bauble they just bounce a bit, snd I was really surprised when a bauble dropped and my grandparents house and didn’t bounce…
- National - Dad going out to buy the paper on Christmas eve, classic story to hide who is playing santa, though personally I found the story told at my grandparents house to be smarter… There would be an uncle looking at his watch and exclaiming that he needed to meet up santa and watch his raindeers, perfectly logical, there was a field a block away and it made sense to have santa land there, and obviously you need someone to watch the deers! Perfectly logical!
- National - Lye treated cod, melted butter and mustard sauce is a great Christmas meal: every Christmas plenty of Swedes put lutfisk on their Christmas table, it is cod with very little taste and the texture of jelly, eaten with potatoes, melted butter and mustard sauce, the sauce is required, and makes the dish excellent! Dad usually makes the sauce from scratch every Christmas eve just before supper.
- National - the upside down V lights in the window: Sweden at Christmas is VERY dark, snd a tradition is to put pyramid shaped electric candle holders in the windows at first Advent and keep them up until late Jan / early Feb, this is a Christmas decoration, not a political protest as was suggested by a Frenchman my dad worked with at one time.
I’m an American, how dare you exclude me from this post!
(This is a joke, please don’t kill me)
New Zealand here. Most of us don’t do a lot of decorating, but some people are really into it. My wife has put up a mini-tree already. The big one comes out on December 1st, even though I argue that’s too early. We like to have an outdoor BBQ on Christmas Day, as it’s generally shorts weather.
Australian here, decorations go up in about early December and come down by early January generally; I imagine similar to the US.
Otherwise given there’s no snow during that time of year, it’s usually celebrated by doing summer things like going to the beach, having a barbie, and generally just a time for families and friends to come together while no-one has work.
That’s a narrower time period than the US. A decent number of people have Christmas decorations up already in the US, and Christmas stuff has been in stores for a while already.
U.S. sample size of 1 here. I don’t have any Christmas decorations up yet, but we have begun updating gift lists, purchasing some gifts (I monitor sales to find the actually decent ones for the 3-4 months prior, but don’t usually buy unless it’s really good), and we’ve watched a couple of Christmas-ish movies (Rise of the Guardians and Alien X-mas). We’ll put up our decorations the weekend after Thanksgiving. Oh, and I keep an eye out for Christmas decorations we like for a decent price. Haven’t found any yet. Did fine a decent projector for half off. I suspect it’s really more like $40 off, but that’s decent. Haven’t bought it yet, though.
Another Aussie here, what JustARegularNerd said is/was generally true, but this year I’ve noticed decorations for sale from October and my neighbours mostly already have their decorations up (most from early November, but one from 2 days before Halloween).
UK here, I expect we’re similar to the US except with mince pies and mulled wine, which I understand aren’t really a thing over there. We won’t out our decorations up until December, maybe a week in or so. Shops put them up around mid November once bonfire night is over.
I used to live in Morocco. There wouldn’t be much of it except in the richer areas where they expected Westerners. You might see some stuff up in shops. It was just a normal day to them but it was weird for my first one as we spent Christmas Day in the outdoor swimming pool. One thing I remember that was strange was that they didn’t really understand the timing of it. To me, Christmas Day is like the last day of Christmas, and the rest of Christmas is the build up to it. They saw Christmas Day as the first day of Christmas and I remember a shopping centre advertising all the Christmas events they had starting on Christmas Day, like they thought westerners would be out and about. I guessed it was because they compared it to Aid (Eid in other Arabic countries), when they slaughter a sheep on the first day then spend the rest of the holiday eating it. They also sort of treated a Christmas tree as a New Years tree, and you would see trees and decorations up in March and April still.
If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right
Sure there’s advent leading up to Christmas
But “christmastide” really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the “twelve days of Christmas” the first day is Christmas.
The lyrics to “Good King Wenceslas” (otherwise known as “that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics”) starts with the titular king looking out his window “on the feast of Stephen” which is the day after Christmas.
Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it’s fair to assume that these weren’t exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can’t really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.
Mulled cider is way more common where I live than wine, but we’re known for apples here so that’s probably why.
US does mulled wine, but it’s more of a general winter thing. More common up north in areas with more northern european influence, I think. Mince pies aren’t really a thing, though, which is a shame.
It only sort of counts (I’m Canadian), but my American wife was delighted that everyone puts up their decorations in mid-November (after Remembrance Day on Nov 11). Our Thanksgiving was back in October.
I generally have an issue with Christmas decorations coming out early and stepping on Thanksgiving. But that kinda works out better.
Since we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving my issue is with Halloween, November is fair game to me hahahah
Another UK perspective here. When the decorations go up may depend on the weather and/or the mood of anyone in the house. Each household will have their own preferences and rules for that and everything else.
Putting the decorations up in November is considered a bit soon, but I have some family precedent regarding that, and there was also something on the radio a few days ago about how particularly dreary weather has convinced a few people to get the Christmas tree and lights out early to brighten up the place.
Some put them up at the start of December, but the sensible time is usually a couple of weekends before the big day.
The superstition about taking them down again before Twelfth Night runs fairly strong here, but mostly because it’s “right” to take them down at that time rather than any courting of misfortune. (Or is it?)
As for other traditions, that’s harder to pin down. You don’t know that what you’re doing might be unusual until you see other people’s perspectives. Everyone knows what a
horsereindeer is… Right?Guarantees: Kids up at the crack of dawn ripping wrapping paper off presents. Someone will want to watch the King’s speech and someone else won’t. Someone will put on music that someone else doesn’t want to listen to.
For the adults around me (and me), we generally wait until after a late breakfast on the day itself to exchange gifts. Then there might be some visiting out or receiving visitors. Visitors might stay for dinner which is mid-afternoon.
Then it’s kids playing with gifts, adults reading any books they might have been bought, and finding something to watch on TV (or streaming or DVD etc.) that everyone can agree on.
… and hoping beyond hope that nothing happens that isn’t going to make you dread Christmas next year.
UK here. Pretty similar to the US in most respects, I think? But we have Christmas pudding, the
queen’sking’s speech on telly, and Boxing Day on the 26th.My wife is Belgian, so in our house we combine the otherwise conflicting traditions of when to open presents: most stuff gets opened at midnight, in the European fashion, but then we save the smaller ‘stocking filler’ gifts until the morning. Best of both worlds!
We also have christmas pudding and kinda celebrate Boxing Day. The only thing different is the queen isn’t on TV here.
Briton here. Decorations go up on the first Sunday of Advent and come down after the feast of the Presentation of Christ at the Temple.
The what now?
It’s just December
