Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Holiday Celebrations and Memories - Part 2

 Calling All Genea-Musings Fans:

 It's Saturday Night Again - 

Time For Some More Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)   Today's challenge is to share memories of December holiday gatherings and celebrations with your families (as a child, a young adult, a parent, a grandparent, a great-grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a nibling, a cousin, an in-law)!  

2)  Pick two or three questions from the list in my blog post:  Ask AI:  "What questions can I write about concerning family gatherings and celebrations during the December holidays?"  Use different questions from the list that you didn't use last week.

3)  Tell us about your memories of your holiday gatherings and celebrations in your own blog post, in a comment here, or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

Here's mine:

a)  "Was gift-giving a major part of the celebration, or did other activities take center stage?"

When I was a child and a teenager, it was the only meaningful part of the celebration.  My parents and grandparents did not go to church, and wanted to make memories for the children and themselves, took few photographs, but had festive dinners and desserts.  

On Christmas morning, the wrapped gifts (except those big ones from Santa Claus that couldn't be wrapped easily) were displayed around the Christmas tree.  We kids got up early, ran into the living room in our pajamas to see the tree and gifts, identified our own gifts, woke up the parents, and we all opened gifts soon afterward and before breakfast.  Whew!  Then we kids had all of Christmas Day (at least until dinner was ready) to play with the gifts out on the land and the street.  I think we made our parents and grandparents happy but exhausted after the gift opening.

As parents, and now grandparents, we wanted our children and grandchildren to have the same experience.  As a parent, that meant hiding the gifts somewhere until Christmas Eve, waiting for the kids to go to sleep, and then trying to quietly put the toys together in my Santa cap before bedtime ( I still remember trying to find out where all of the extra screws for the toy kitchen set were supposed to go one year).  Then the explosion of joy when the kids awoke and saw the gifts, and we opened all of the gifts before breakfast.  

b)  "Do you think gatherings today are similar to those your ancestors might have had?"

I am quite sure that holiday gatherings today are different from those of my ancestors in the 1700, 1800 and 1900 time frame.  I asked ChatGPT4, an artificial intelligence tool, to tell me about gathering participants, what happened, where were they held, and what sort of gifts were given to young children, older children, teenagers, young adults, and older adults? in those years.  You can read about it in https://chatgpt.com/c/675cac24-a4a8-8005-8f86-4eb3d36d73e2.

I also asked about the years 1950 and 2000, when I was a boy 7 years old in 1950 and a parent in 2000 with two married adult children without children of their own.  It's in the AI chat also.  That describes in general detail what my experience was, and the experience we had as parents and grandparents.   I wonder what the year 2100 will be like?  Probably different than today.

c)  "Were there traditions or moments that became legendary in your family, retold year after year?"

Our Seaver family tradition was to have roast turkey, mashed potatoes, green peas, stuffing and pumpkin pie every year for Christmas dinner cooked with loving hands and with the intent of having leftovers.  We always had leftover peas for some reason after dinner.  Starting in the 1970s at my grandparents home, my father, me and my brothers, and any other male attendee (but not my grandfather) had a contest after dinner at the dinner table, much to the chagrin of my mother and grandparents.  We would try to toss leftover peas into the drink glasses on the other side of the table - first one to make ten pea-shots won the game, so it lasted quite awhile.   We were all very competitive.  After my grandparents died, the competition continued, and my mother participated while my wife and my sisters-in-law looked on with much amusement.  After my father died in 1983, this was named the "Great Frederick Seaver Pea-shoot" and the ladies and then the children participated.  It really didn't make much of a mess unless someone knocked a drink over in the process.  My wife and the sisters-in-law cleaned up afterwards.  I think we stopped the contest after my mother died in 2002. 

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