This is a tradition in my maternal family, and it's very in keeping with the title of this fest, as you shall see.
Every Christmas Day, my maternal family sings 'The Twelve Days of Christmas,' while one family member holds up a tea towel. The tea towel is the crucial component for this tradition, and I was actually able to find, selling on eBay, an image of the exact tea towel in question.
This tradition began in a rather silly way, as most family traditions do: my sister, cousins and I, aged between 4-8 years old, were rushing around chaotically, hyped up on sugar, presents, and the general excess and hysteria that is Christmas afternoon for small children. The meal had been eaten, all presents had been distributed, but the festivities were still in full swing. Although my grandparents' house was large and sprawling, we must have been making enough of a racket to be heard from the other side of the house.
My grandmother had, for whatever reason, been given one of the tea towels as seen in the link above. Out of the kind of desperation that only someone who was the oldest of five extremely talkative siblings, had raised four extremely loquacious daughters to adulthood, and was now matriarch of a growing brood of extremely loud, unstoppable granddaughters (and one very quiet grandson) could understand, she hit on the idea of holding the tea towel aloft, and getting us kids to sing all the verses of the song. It certainly didn't quiet us down, but it was calming. The noise drew various aunts down to our end of the house, the song was repeated many times, and by the time Christmas rolled around the following year it had morphed into a 'tradition' to sing it around the dining table after the meal.
We're still singing it twenty-seven years later. The original tea towel deteriorated, and for some years all we had were colour photocopies made by one of my aunts, kept in plastic sleeve folders and brought out at Christmas. Then that same aunt managed to track down a new tea towel online. Confused boyfriends and husbands (my maternal family is almost entirely women, and although not all of us are straight, we have, thus far, all seemed to end up with male partners) were inducted into this ritual. My cousin — one of the original group of children clustered around my grandmother when the whole tradition began — taught her Korean husband all the words before he first joined our family for Christmas, and now their children sing the song in videos recorded in Korea, where they now live. The first year I moved to the UK, and celebrated Christmas with unfamiliar cousins of my father's, the whole family Skyped with me from their Christmas festivities, singing the song.
It has been many years since I've celebrated Christmas with my family (by which I mean that racuous, loud, all-talking-at-once crowd of maternal relatives), and my grandmother who invented the tradition is no longer with us. But that song, and that ridiculous tea towel, will always be Christmas for me: not presents, not even the meal (no matter how much my family and I love food, and cooking, and eating), but rather that sense of being part of that multigenerational horde of self-deprecating, uncompromising, loud, emotional women (and the quiet men who love them), who gave me my voice, and taught me to listen, singing together.
Festive tradition for Request 1
Every Christmas Day, my maternal family sings 'The Twelve Days of Christmas,' while one family member holds up a tea towel. The tea towel is the crucial component for this tradition, and I was actually able to find, selling on eBay, an image of the exact tea towel in question.
This tradition began in a rather silly way, as most family traditions do: my sister, cousins and I, aged between 4-8 years old, were rushing around chaotically, hyped up on sugar, presents, and the general excess and hysteria that is Christmas afternoon for small children. The meal had been eaten, all presents had been distributed, but the festivities were still in full swing. Although my grandparents' house was large and sprawling, we must have been making enough of a racket to be heard from the other side of the house.
My grandmother had, for whatever reason, been given one of the tea towels as seen in the link above. Out of the kind of desperation that only someone who was the oldest of five extremely talkative siblings, had raised four extremely loquacious daughters to adulthood, and was now matriarch of a growing brood of extremely loud, unstoppable granddaughters (and one very quiet grandson) could understand, she hit on the idea of holding the tea towel aloft, and getting us kids to sing all the verses of the song. It certainly didn't quiet us down, but it was calming. The noise drew various aunts down to our end of the house, the song was repeated many times, and by the time Christmas rolled around the following year it had morphed into a 'tradition' to sing it around the dining table after the meal.
We're still singing it twenty-seven years later. The original tea towel deteriorated, and for some years all we had were colour photocopies made by one of my aunts, kept in plastic sleeve folders and brought out at Christmas. Then that same aunt managed to track down a new tea towel online. Confused boyfriends and husbands (my maternal family is almost entirely women, and although not all of us are straight, we have, thus far, all seemed to end up with male partners) were inducted into this ritual. My cousin — one of the original group of children clustered around my grandmother when the whole tradition began — taught her Korean husband all the words before he first joined our family for Christmas, and now their children sing the song in videos recorded in Korea, where they now live. The first year I moved to the UK, and celebrated Christmas with unfamiliar cousins of my father's, the whole family Skyped with me from their Christmas festivities, singing the song.
It has been many years since I've celebrated Christmas with my family (by which I mean that racuous, loud, all-talking-at-once crowd of maternal relatives), and my grandmother who invented the tradition is no longer with us. But that song, and that ridiculous tea towel, will always be Christmas for me: not presents, not even the meal (no matter how much my family and I love food, and cooking, and eating), but rather that sense of being part of that multigenerational horde of self-deprecating, uncompromising, loud, emotional women (and the quiet men who love them), who gave me my voice, and taught me to listen, singing together.