Welcome, oh ye merry folks, to the second annual Christmas Surprise Giveaway party, hosted by your friendly neighbourhood Santas better known as PaterAlf and skimmie!

Last year, we needed your help because our party was only partially complete and we needed you, our great GOG community, to fill in the blanks with your favourite holiday songs and/or your best holiday recipes. Well, this year we didn’t forget about those (how could we, with all the great suggestions and ideas we got in 2018?), but we messed up once again...we have delicious food, and beautiful music...but no decorations! And, maybe even worse, no gifts for our loved ones!

We had such a blast last year and we hope to repeat, or even improve upon, the great spirit that you all managed to create back then. But for that, we need you to chime in and tell us about the most special Christmas present that you ever got from, or that you ever gave to, your loved ones. Or, let us know what kind of decoration or ornament is customary where you live, or just that one special decoration that you simply cannot do without in this festive period. Pictures, videos or other audiovisual support is highly welcome!

Just like last year, we’re also having (kind of) a giveaway among those who actively contribute to the thread. If you post a story about a present or ornament, please also make sure to let us know if you’re in for the GA or not, and if you’re in, make sure your wish list is public (or set it to ‘friends’ and add us as friends, at least for the duration of the giveaway). We’ll be going around and dropping gifts in your stockings here and there if you participated, so you MIGHT end up with a gift from us, sooner or later! Then again, you might not. After all, we’re just sharing stories; please keep in mind the GA is a bonus.

Happy holidays and enjoy the party!

A decoration that is very common in my part of Germany are Christmas pyramids. You see them a lot and you can get them in almost all sizes and shapes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRZSw3tqHSE

As you can see in the video the pyramids don't necessarily show Christian motives. Quite often they also show folklore or traditional motives from the region they come from (e.g. mining motives for pyramids from the Erzgebirge).

There used to be a dog that would follow me around my area when he'd see me. At first I gave it some water. When he started showing up more often, I started giving it food. He started sleeping outside my house, so it was time to let him move in. Although he's fluffy, I didn't want him spending the winter out in the cold. By Christmas, he had his own little dog house and started getting along with my other dog (after a few fights). He's been with me for the past 5 years. Best Christmas present I ever got.

Edit: I'm in!

Our Christmas garland (as well as neighbour next door) got stolen during Christmas time. Some people don't do Christmas garlands, but we did and now we have some cheap and ugly decoration in case they got stolen.
I'm in.

Due to changing my job last year, I was finally able to give each family member something they wanted for years. The best thing was not what they got, but how they got it - it was a night full of surprises :D Their happy faces made it my best Christmas ever, and THAT was the best present I ever got.
I'd like to be in.

I remember last year's thread - you two are too generous. :-) I'd like to be in for the giveaway. Received - That has to be a puppy at the age of 5. An Otterhound that looked exactly like this. It was a rescue dog that was mistreated (we didn't know the details but it cowered every time we went to stroke it), so we gave it (and it gave me) the best Christmas ever and it settled into the family very well. Lasted a good 18 years too (normal lifespan is typically 10-13 years for that medium sized breed).

Gave - It was a photo album for a relative. She lost her daughter at the age of just 3 months (one of the rarer Trisomy genetic conditions) and nearly lost the few photo's she had when her laptop died and couldn't find the originals, but I managed to extract the HDD and salvage them, cleaned them up a bit had them printed out properly at a photo shop and put into an album. To say she was overjoyed was putting it mildly.

Decorations - I really can't think of anything specific, other than in our house Santa apparently "expected" children to leave out a mince pie and help pour out a large Gin & Tonic on Christmas Eve. Even at the age of 6 or 7, I think I figured out pretty quickly exactly which "Santa" swiped that about 5 minutes after I went to bed... ;-)

A friend of mine had one of those Christmas trees that snows on itself when he was a kid. His parents bought it, and he thought it was cool. But over time he noticed that there was less and less artificial snow coming out of the spout at the top of the tree. Eventually, he figured out that some of the little plastic balls of snow were falling into the little holes on top of the glass ornaments, filling them up with "snow". When he told his folks, it then became his job to shake out the snow from the ornaments every day. He hated that job. Today, whenever he tells this story, he wonders why he didn't just tape over the holes on the ornaments or some other permanent solution. But no -- every day he had to "empty out the ornaments". It's hilarious every time I hear the story.

I'm in.

Mine is ornament and gift combined. I'm in as well, though I'm just glad I get to write about this since I don't think I've ever had actual reason to outside of talking to someone in the circle of my family about it.

Many years ago, when I was in early grade school, around the Christmas holiday my teacher says to us (as a class) "We'll be making angels today". Being at the young age I was, I wasn't exactly sure what to make of that. My mind went through a number of scenarios, mostly jumping to the obvious ones (paper, snow, etc.) until the teacher demonstrated what it was we were going to be doing exactly just a few hours before the lunch break began.

She got out a lot of pasta. I'm not just talking elbow macaroni either - I'm talking about rotelle, farfalle, penne and vermicelli (that I can recall from memory, at least - though at that age all I knew and recognized at the time was macaroni). She also had some other things, like small wooden balls, permanent markers, thumb tacks, nail polish, string, tape, glue and canned snow.

She began to put together an angel made out of the various parts of pasta (the body was the penne, the macaroni acted as the hands, the farfalle the wings, the rotelle as a makeshift neck/base to hold the small wooden ball that would be the head and you get the idea). She explained that the thumb tacks would serve as a candle that the angels we were making would be holding and the nail polish was to be used to tip the end in red to make it look as if the "candles" were lit. The markers were there for us to give our angels faces/expressions. Once they were all put together, we would then attach string to them and hang them in an area she had set up so they could be sprayed with the canned snow to give them a white flocked look and they'd stay there until they dried overnight.

Essentially what were making was a Christmas tree ornament. I got mine together - to this day, I'm not proud of the face I gave it (think a bit like a blow-up doll: always surprised despite the fact that it knows what's going to happen; in my defense, I was a young kid and didn't put the full concentration behind it accordingly) but I knew once it was done I was going to happily give it to my mother and hope it would work on our tree at home.

I brought it to her - she was thrilled (as most mothers should be, undoubtedly) and that year my angel took up a spot on our tree (to give an idea of a sense of scale, this is not a "sits at the top of the tree" type of ornament). That was roughly 30 years ago. To my amazement, that angel survived multiple moves and numerous different Christmas trees over the years. Not to mention it somehow managed to get spared from being completely destroyed when our family had ornery cats who decided that the ornaments on the tree were things they were going to swat at and break whenever they felt the feline boredom kicking in.

Unfortunately, a few years ago my mother was diagnosed with COPD and that vastly limited her ability to do a lot of things that she either took for granted prior to the diagnosis or just otherwise enjoyed doing without little thought to the contrary. She loves Christmas but once the COPD came into the picture, she could no longer put up and take down a Christmas tree by herself without getting dangerously short of breath. In a perfect reality, I want to imagine she'd just be okay with leaving the tree up all year round but there's a line between fantasy and impracticality unfortunately. This turn of events forced her to give up a majority of the ornaments she had kept over the years - most of them went to my sister and a few to myself. She asked me if I'd wanted the angel I had made and gave to her and after thinking about it, I told her that it had survived this long (which is still astounding given that it's made out of decades old pasta and glue, basically) and I wanted it to continue to have a place on a tree so I thought it was best that it go to my sister and her family.

Since then, it's still survived (again, to my own shock) despite the fact that my sister is a dog person (she's had anywhere from a max of 3 to a current of 2) and the dogs she has/had are complete clumsy boneheads that tend to crash into her Christmas tree when she and her husband and my nephews set it up. I've had talks with her where she'll tell me "we lost a handful of glass ornaments this year because the dogs don't have built-in brakes" and each time I hear her say something like that I think "well, the angel had a good run" but so far I've yet to hear her tell me that it's been demolished.

It may not be a "tradition" in the... well, traditional sense but the angel I'd made became a recurring staple in my family's Christmas routine far longer than I personally expected it to. I know just by writing it that it'll probably jinx it right into oblivion but I'm beginning to think the angel might outlive even me at this point.

Received
My wife gave me a complete book edition of Bob Dylan's lyrics. It's a big old fat book - the biggest book I own. It sits on top of our living room bookshelf. I even take it down now and then to play songs from or to show to fellow Dylan fans. I love it so much!


Gave
This year I gave my wife a butcher block counter top from a custome furniture store. It was a big splurge and she knows it. She loves the counter, and I am very happy that I was able to give it to her.


Decoration
My Hungarian grandmother - who is still alive in her 90s - would always decorate her home with oranges hung from strings and punctured all over with whole cloves. The orange and clove smell was wonderful. I think of it every Christmas. Maybe this year I'll do it myself!


I would like to be in for the possible giveaway. I love getting surprise presents, I cannot lie about it.

Our Christmas tradition is diving in the ice hole. - 30 degree centigrade frost is not a hindrance.
It is believed that water on this day washes away all sins.
Main decoration is ice hole in the shape of a cross. I'm in.

When I was a child my grandparents and I usually decorated Christmas tree with nuts wrapped in aluminium foil and candies in simplistic wraps on threads. I favoured candies because I could eat one or two every day. We would also put a lot of bells, angels, and Santas on a tree and I enjoyed watching our cat boxing with all of them. Our cat would also occasionally mess in and with other decorations like a nativity scene or climb and hide in the tree. After a bit more pondering I come to the conclusion that the cat was our dearest and also a naughtiest Christmas tree decoration :) We would also hang sparklers on the tree. We took some sparklers of the tree from time to time and lighted them on fire around a New year.

Winters were then harsher and with lot more snow, so I used it to make whole families of snowmen in my yard and garden. I remember especially one year when I made nine of them. The Cat was also involved, well sort of, he ran away in fear and came home about two weeks later when snowpeople have partially or totally melted. He then boxed with their diminished remains too like he was thinking "Die you foul frosty beasts that have encircled my home". Cat had such a feeling of relief mixed with triumph when they melted away, it was so funny.

I'm in. Dear skimmie and PaterAlf thank you for keeping nice traditions alive. I wish you both merry winter holiday season or summer holiday season if you are planning to spend Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. Same wishes to the whole GOG community!

A tradition of my family was celebrating Christmas on the 24.12 like in austria where we live and on the 07.01 like in Russia where my family is originated from.
We had an plastic tree, put all kind of decorations on the tree, had like glowing chains across the room(hope that's the right word ^^), had many classic Russian food, little presents laying under the tree
Good old times..

And there one very sweet Christmas story that I remembered which happened while I was still in school.
We had a very sweet but poor girl in our class which really wanted a smartphone but her parents couldn't afford one not even an old cheap one.
She loves Musik, she really wanted to socalize more with all of us, we had a whatsapp group for our class where we exchanged important stuff, learning materials, we often could just make pictures of what the teacher wrote instead of writing it down, so it was very stressy without a phone.
So our whole class and our class teacher decided to make a surprise for her, we all put a few bucks together, an guy from our parallel class was selling his old iPhone and he gave it to us at like 60-70% off.
It had a broken frontscreeen, broken back, no charger, headphones, packaging.
First we let the display repair, next a few people from artclass made a flashy new backpannel with the initials from all our class on it.
When the backpannel was on the phone we bought a new charger, some very good headphones, we made an box where we all wrote our names on.
So everything got ready a few days bevore the last schoolday before Christmas, than on the last day we made it so a few of us come in together with her a few minutes late, we all screamed happy Christmas and man it was so sweet how happy she was.
She was so thankful and it felt so good to make another person happy.
I really love this memory.
Good old times<3

Nice of you to do this, Pater & Skimmie Claus.......btw can we post more music anyhow, then, even if you have plenty already? Not a loved one per se, but I remember one year my family was very poor(many bills) so we wouldn't have many christmas presents or food one year. Some kind soul out of the blue donated some gift cards for food and presents and because of them we had a very warm and happy christmas after all......it is one of my most cherished holiday memories. :) You too! *gets a drink handy* Salud!

(Also I am IN & +1) Nice...btw why do many of them have fan blades on top? Decoration or for the breeze/etc?

================== I got one of my 3 cats that way....we found her out in the cold one november and I lured her in with food and kind words. Now she's a part of my family for many years. :)

I may actually come back to enter or not enter at a later date, but in the meantime, from the ending credits of the film Smoke, here is Auggie Wrens Christmas Story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97IrbTlPxUc

Link does contain maybe one very mild spoiler, so if you havent seen Smoke, maybe give it a go first.

not in, no story, just +1

:)