A Christmas question

Lately, I’ve been experiencing something that could be considered either writer’s block or just a realization that I don’t have much left to say. Call it a nod to civility, or call it exhaustion: both may be accurate.
           
When a columnist hits this sort of a wall, he’s generally best suited to reach out to his readers or determine whether he has any readers in the first place—I’ve never known with any certainty unless I’m being scolded.
 
For a while now, I’ve hoped that someone would come out of the woodwork and decide that he/she wants to pen a weekly or monthly guest column to provide a different perspective, ideological balance and/or another person to get mad at, but I haven’t found anyone yet. If you or someone you know wants to step up, you know where to find me.
           
With the pretext out of the way, I’ve concluded that I want to take a stab at making My Three Cents Worth a bit more interactive, and after dropping about half of my weekly pay on gifts last weekend, I’m finally in the holiday spirit. So my question for you all is simple: what’s the weirdest/most unique Christmas tradition in your family?
           
We’re all different, and I’ve never considered my yearly routine particularly strange besides the fact that my aunts and my grandma seemed to do everything in their power to delay gift opening and drive us kids mad. It was dinner, then coffee, then dessert, then more coffee, and then we opened presents one at a time in order by age all the way up to Grandma Gerry. Tedious and infuriating, but nothing extraordinary.
           
The other permanent Christmas memories from my youth are riding in a car while finding new ways to occupy time (every year, we went to my mom’s hometown of Duluth, a solid seven hours from Alta, and I think I finished at least one of the Harry Potter books on each trip), my parents (in a yearly ritual) popping in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and me wondering why anyone would ever watch such an old, grainy movie, sneaking into the study to check the score of the Chiefs game on the 10-inch TV, reading through all of grandma’s back issues of Time magazine, sledding, trying on every article of clothing we got on Christmas Day and, due to the ancestry on that side of the family and the fact that we were in Duluth, the decidedly Scandinavian tinge of everything we did. Lefse, I could abide by: it’s just butter and sugar rolled inside of a tortilla. Luckily, though, we were never subjected to the horrors of lutefisk. We only heard stories.
           
Scrapple—an apparently Dutch breakfast pork dish that I’m almost certain the settlers ate on their way out west centuries before us—was another strange staple, but it wasn’t bad, per se. It just looked funny.
           
All in all, our Christmases were never particularly whacky, and like all things, the old routine ended. Grandma passed in 2011, and her house was sold shortly thereafter. My folks moved to the Des Moines area, and then Christmas moved there. Kellie and I got together, and before long I was immersing myself in her family’s Christmas traditions—and totally not judging her when she put her tree up the day after Halloween.
           
But I’m sure there are people out there who are far more interesting than me, and some of them may even read The Grundy Register. So now it’s my turn to put the question to you: what’s your wackiest, most off the wall annual tradition? How did it start? Have new significant others or first time family Christmas attendees given you blank stares and thought you were nuts when you attempted to explain it?
           
If anyone responds, I’ll unscientifically determine which ritual is the wackiest, give you the notoriety of being mentioned on these hallowed pages, and maybe even throw in a donation to the local charity of your choice. It’s not much, but it’s something.
           
As Janie Strickler, who I spoke to about a week ago for a story on “Operation Merry and Bright,” put it so succinctly, a lot of us around here already have everything we need, so let’s do what we can to help those who don’t.