What was your favorite Christmas family tradition when you were a child?

Early Christmas Eve my mother and father would drive my siblings and I two hours to my Granny and Grandpa's house where we would meet our aunts, uncles, and cousins for holiday merriment and celebration.

Granny and Grandpa's house was a very large 3 story colonial style home in the picturesque countryside of northeast Missouri located about 20 country miles from Mark Twain's childhood cabin and the Mississippi River.

I come from a musically rich family so holidays were filled with the sounds of piano, violin, and song. The only arguments that would occur were between my mother and uncle and usually involved whether or not someone was singing out of tune.

Just before dinner Grandpa would silence everyone and read the Christmas story straight from the Bible just before saying prayer. Adults and lucky young adults sat at the "adult table"...children and unfortunate young adults sat at the "kids tables". For what it's worth, I didn't make it to the adult table until I was 29. LOL.

Dinner was HUGE and consisted of wild and tame turkey, ham, oyster stuffing, oyster stew, boiled shrimp, the regular fixings, and several home made pies. Alcohol flowed freely. Teenagers would sneak a few beers to the 3rd floor where a completely separate party took place (the adults knew what was going on up there, but it was only one night of the year so they turned a blind eye to it).

Suddenly (and usually toward the end of dinner), everyone would hear the faint ringing of bells outside and then soon after Santa would barge into the front door with a loud and convincing, "Ho, ho, ho...Merry Christmas!"

All the kids would chaotically run to Santa and then line up to sit on his lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas. The magical thing is that Santa always recalled exactly what all the adults in the house wanted when they were children. His "gift" of recollection made every kid in Granny and Grandpa's house a true believer

Of course when we became young adults we found out that generations of men from a specific farm family in the area would drive to houses on Christmas Eve and visit families that had paid a small fee for the service. Mother told us that Santa had always visited Granny and Grandpa's house even when she was a child which only made us kids believe in him even more.

Santa would give each child a small brown bag of treats and cheap toys (different bags for girls and boys) and then as swiftly as he had arrived he was gone.

We would end the night with a few more songs. We'd listen to the local radio Christmas station give an NORAD sponsored Santa flight tracker update. And then the adults would command us to bed with warnings that Santa may skip Granny and Grandpa's house if we weren't asleep.

Early the next morning all the kids would awake to a living room transformed into a gift package wonderland. The incredibly tired adults would drag themselves out of their beds, make coffee, and attempt to stay awake while the kids organized and tore into their Christmas gifts. Grandpa, my father, and my uncle would sometimes fall asleep in their chairs while the women took pictures and simultaneously bitched at the men for falling asleep.

The Killz family Christmas was truly magical.

Those days are gone. Grandpa passed way a few years ago. Granny is trying hard to beat the onset of dementia at 90 years old. Traditions have changed, but the memories are as fresh in our minds as cool mountain air...or as Ray Kinsella once said, "The memories [are] so thick [we] have to brush them away from their faces."

I'm now creating new Christmas traditions with the hope that future generations of family experience the same kind of magic that I once did when I was child at Granny and Grandpa's house on Christmas Eve...and that's exciting.

I'm starting now what my grandfather started in the 1950s. I am my grandfather's spirit reborn in the flesh.

Merry Christmas.