One of my favorite holidays of the year is Christmas. It is mainly one of my favorite holidays because everything stops on Christmas, in my family at least. No one has work, basketball practice, Emails, workouts or coaching to go to. It is a great time to actually hang out with family without distractions. We always went to New Jersey for Christmas every year until my brother bought a new house on Long Island so we moved Christmas to his house and started some new traditions.
One of the newest traditions that we have started in the last two years is the saran wrap ball game. Instead of doing stockings we all buy gifts that would go into people’s stockings (no bigger than an iPhone) and we would saran wrap them all into a giant ball. The object of the game is to unravel this massive ball and try to see how many gifts you can get before the person to your left rolls doubles on a pair of dice. In the middle of the ball will have the grand prize which so far has been amazon gift cards (which are like gold in my house). This game has been a big hit in our house the last two years and we will probably keep it going.
My family always gives out Christmas lists of what they want from everyone. One of my favorite things to do is to get people things off of the lists. I don’t like knowing what I’m going to get so I try to throw in a few surprises for others as well. I think I have been voted best gift giver in recent years (slightly bragging here).
Then lastly one of my favorite things we do on Christmas is that my brother and I always watch the Christmas NBA games no matter who is playing. Generally, I prefer NCAA games over the NBA but we make an exception on Christmas. Then after the games we sit down and have our big Christmas dinner and sit at the table for hours just enjoying each other’s company. I used to hate sitting there for ages when I was younger but as I have gotten older I have realized how valuable that time is with my family and never want to get up from the table.
