David Murdock Column: On Christmas traditions (trees, ornaments and KFC)

The last week before Christmas found many of my friends and I practicing what I now realize is a Christmas tradition — sharing our respective particular family Christmas traditions! We’ve done it for years; I simply never realized that we’ve been doing it. Even my “new” friends and I practice this tradition.

Y’all know me, I’m all about Christmas traditions, so I loved the realization. Every family “does” Christmas slightly differently. All of them delight me. I really enjoy hearing what other families do to celebrate Christmas. One thing I’ve noticed is how those traditions evolve over the years with each generation of the family.

Take Christmas trees, for example, which is a fairly recent addition to the repertoire of Christmas traditions. The widespread practice of putting up Christmas trees like we do now is really only less than 150 to 200 years old in America, depending on the source consulted. It seems to come from Germany, and was only widely practiced in America by the middle to late 1800s (again, depending on historical sources).

What I can attest to is this: My family’s tradition of putting up Christmas trees has changed in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there was no way Mom and Dad would have brought an artificial tree into the house. To them, it just wasn’t “right.” By the time I was an adult, they had an artificial tree — a really nice one, I thought. It was beautiful. To be honest, I missed the fragrance of a live evergreen, but that’s about it.

Honestly, getting a live Christmas tree is quite a chore. And it’s grown quite expensive. The convenience of an artificial tree is a real game-changer, and even a fairly expensive artificial tree saves money over the long term.

The aspect of the Christmas tree tradition that differs among my friends’ families and mine is this: When does your family put up the tree and take it down? That’s a loaded question indeed.

Some families put up their trees soon after Thanksgiving — I’ve known a few families that insist on decorating the tree on Thanksgiving night — and leave it up to New Year’s Day. Frankly, I don’t remember when we put up and decorated the tree when I was a kid, but I know it wasn’t on Thanksgiving.

Some families insist on leaving the tree up until Epiphany — Jan. 6, sometimes known as Three Kings’ Day — that celebrates the visit of the Wise Men in some denominations.

That’s been quite a subject of conversation among my friends and me over the years, but introduce the idea of how to decorate the Christmas tree, and it opens up another subject entirely.

Some families use only the traditional colors of red, green, and gold, for example. Others go for entirely different color schemes — I really like blue decorations, I admit, although all of my ornaments are in the traditional colors.

Then there are the ornaments that have particular family meanings. That’s often when the conversations grow the most personal and touching. All families have some decorations that someone outside the family would have a difficult time understanding why it’s there. 

My little bachelor Christmas tree has miniature airplane ornaments from Hallmark on it. I haven’t put that little tree up in a long time, but those ornaments are lovingly stored away for a time when I will.

Why airplanes? Just because it’s my tradition that got started years ago and ran until Hallmark discontinued the series (they still offer a larger series of airplanes, but not the ones small enough to “fit” my miniature tree).

Now, here’s where Christmas traditions grow marvelously strange. Every year about this time, articles will appear in the newspapers or on the internet about the Christmas traditions of other countries. Mostly, those articles describe the customs of traditionally and historically Christian nations.

Those traditions are colorful and wonderful, but the one Christmas tradition of another country that has utterly and completely fascinated me is one practiced in a traditionally non-Christian nation: Japan.

Japan’s population is only about 1% to 2% Christian, according to most sources, yet quite a few Japanese families celebrate Christmas in the most charming way … with a bucket of chicken (and all the fixin’s) from KFC! 

Although Christmas is not an official holiday there, most of the articles I’ve read about KFC in Japan at Christmas state that this traditional Japanese Christmas dinner must be ordered weeks in advance! Evidently, it all stems from an advertising campaign launched by KFC in the 1970s, and many KFC stores in Japan feature Col. Sanders statues in Christmas apparel when the holiday nears.

I guess in Japan that it’s not so much about when one puts up a Christmas tree as when the local KFC franchise puts up their “Christmas Col. Sanders.”

Oh, I love that one.

As I’ve gotten older, though, celebrating Christmas has changed for me in another way. In the last 15 years or so, I’ve become far more observant of the religious meaning of Christmas — it has become a profound experience of the meaning of faith, in ways that I wouldn’t have imagined when I was a kid.

I wish y’all a Merry Christmas.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.  

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock looks at Christmas traditions