{"id":2089,"date":"2007-12-23T17:32:02","date_gmt":"2007-12-24T00:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/23\/twas-the-night-before-christmas\/"},"modified":"2007-12-23T17:32:02","modified_gmt":"2007-12-24T00:32:02","slug":"twas-the-night-before-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2089","title":{"rendered":"&#039;Twas the Night Before Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I asked my\u00c2\u00a0father and sisters what we\u00c2\u00a0did for Christmas Eve when we were young but, oddly enough,\u00a0none of us remembered the same things.<\/p>\n<p>While my family can&#8217;t really\u00c2\u00a0agree how we spent Christmas Eve when we were young, I remember that we did have a few Christmas Eve rituals.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We almost always spent the day at home.<\/li>\n<li>There were preparations for Santa&#8217;s arrival. A plate of cookies and a glass\u00c2\u00a0of milk, and even sometimes a few carrots for the reindeer.<\/li>\n<li>There were preparations for Christmas Day. My mother would start Christmas dinner, at least whatever she could\u00c2\u00a0do in advance .\u00a0Christmas dinner was either ham or turkey (my preference was turkey).<\/li>\n<li>If snow fell on Christmas Eve, we would shovel the walk, brush the snow off the car, and sweep off the porches.<\/li>\n<li>And, when we were old enough to attend Midnight Mass, we would get dressed in our best clothes and head off to church.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Written for the <a title=\"Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories\" href=\"http:\/\/destinationaustinfamily.blogspot.com\/2007\/12\/advent-calendar-of-christmas-memories.html\">Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories<\/a> &#8211; Day 24.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Stephen J. Danko<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I asked my\u00c2\u00a0father and sisters what we\u00c2\u00a0did for Christmas Eve when we were young but, oddly enough,\u00a0none of us remembered the same things. While my family can&#8217;t really\u00c2\u00a0agree how we spent Christmas Eve when we were young, I remember that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2089\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[161],"class_list":["post-2089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-journal","tag-advent-calendar"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pyBfX-xH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}