What Do You Celebrate? Or Do You ...?

I'm in the mood for some vintage Christmas celebration pics today as I extend my HOLIDAY CARD ADDRESS CALL-OUT to my cyber friends for another day. Email or PM your address to me so that I can send you this year's Holiday Card (which is CUTE even if I do say so myself - LOL).

This photo from 1933 shows Baby LeRoy, a one-year-old
star with Paramount, playing with his new toys under
the Christmas tree. Isn't his expression just fabulous? 

Thinking about Christmas, however, brought to mind the basic fact - I celebrate the day, not the event. Thus, I have a day off from work, my DH and I exchange gifts and eat food and generally have a nice day, and then we pick up with our lives again on the following day (which is actually DH's birthday - poor baby). But we're not religious, I'm most certainly NOT Christian, so we don't celebrate Christmas in the pure meaning of the holiday.

Christmas trees used to be much more open and skinnier.
Today's tree would be hard to tie up that thin. I love this
young boy attempting to carry a tree three times his own
height. 

Which got me to thinking about my friends on this board and others and questioning how each of you spend the Yuletide holiday time. I was raised a cultural Jew, so I visited my friends houses who had Christmas trees and loved the lights and the tinsel. I fell in love with Christmas trees and have had them in my home for as long as I've had a home in which to put them. There's just something about looking at those lights shining that makes the season a joy-filled one for me.

When I was growing up, Christmas trees were magic. Those sparkling
colored lights seen through tinsel-clad branches along with garlands
of popped corn and cranberries - it was perfect. I loved lying beneath the
tree and gazing upward. 

But I don't celebrate Christmas, as I said above. I've lit the Chanukah candles and twirled the dreidel and gotten small bags of gelt. I've chanted and danced in the solstice. I've shared holiday meals with Buddhists and Muslims. I've shared holiday cookies with agnostics and atheists.  It's all good.

Here, a load of Christmas trees are being delivered in New York
sometime between the years 1910-1915, Those are great horses, aren't they? 

Share a holiday tradition with me today. In our house, we always bake holiday cookies. We don't get a chance to share the experience, but by the time Christmas actually arrives, both DH and I have baked on our respective days off and cookies abound. What's one of your traditions?

Christmas trees didn't always have to be large and
gaudy. Christmas gifts could be minimal but
heartfelt. This picture from 1930 shows it all. 

Happy Thursday - stay safe, stay warm.