Love the holidays! Over commercial or not, I don't have to buy into the hype but choose to celebrate my own way and have fun.
Halloween is a great kick off. My daughter usually plans a costume a year in advance and has been known to spend months and months sewing and creating. Then we usually have a party with our collective homeschooling families. When the kids were younger, they would go out treating, but now they hang out in their costumes and watch a semi-spooky movie and just be themselves. The parents hang out in another room with wine and snacks and relax. We're also taking the kids ice skating in the afternoon this year for "Halloween on ice"
Thanksgiving has changed a lot over the years. About 20 years ago my mother started making it really big after recovering from breast cancer treatment. For a while we'd have extended family travel and come and we'd have up to 30 people together for the meal. Then older generations started getting older and the party dwindled because it was too hard to travel. Last year my grandmother died a few days before Thanksgiving and that was hard. She loved Thanksgiving so much. This year, as I did last year, I will take over making the dishes my Grandmother made (Corn bread pudding, Indian pudding, chocolate cream pie, pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes...) and my mom will make an entree and we will get together for a nice big meal.
The day after Thanksgiving we stay home and play board games and avoid the crazy outside...
Someday between Thanksgiving and Christmas (which we celebrate) my daughter wakes up to find I've cancelled everything so that we can have an all out crafting blitz and we start playing holiday music and make wintery crafts all day.
Christmas eve we have dinner at my parents house, usually something simple like quiche and salad (My mom doesn't like to cook and my dad doesn't think to take over) and we just visit.
I host Christmas day at my house. Overnight I make steel cut oats in the crockpot, and then in the morning my daughter and I make a few quiche. Usually my daughter spends the week before baking sweet breads and muffins. I put all that out with a big bowl of fruit and a lot of coffee and family comes. It's sort of small, my parents, and by brother, his wife, and their son who will be 1 1/2 this year. Everyone eats a lot and there is an exchange of gifts, largely centered around the kids. My family is pretty practical and other than my brother, most of us are not too into tangible goods as gifts, so often gifts are things like registrations for a class someone wants to take, or tickets to a play, or a gift certificate to go somewhere special. I make a huge dinner with shellfish, some sort of poultry, loads of vegetables, etc. Then we bring out the pies and cocktails. We usually run well into the evening once we've gotten through it all.
The day after Christmas my daughter and I play whatever new games might have come into the house and eat leftovers and do not leave home.
My guy and his kids will get here a day or two after Christmas, so they can spend the actual holiday with family who lives right there near them. We will take a few (home based) vacation days to go snow tubing, have board game marathons, and relax. Don't tell, but my father is building all of the kids wooden stilts, because they experienced them at a festival over the summer and loved them. So I foresee a fair amount of time being spent watching the kids master the art of stilt walking. Depending on how much snow and ice we get, this could be very interesting, or scary.
New years, last year my guy and I went to dinner at an Irish pub, followed by an awesome stand up comedy night at a local theater. We're going to do that again this year. My daughter will visit with my parents while we're out and then we'll all be home probably an hour or so before midnight. I don't have a television so we might put on a computer to watch a ball drop somewhere, or not, not a big deal.
Fun to read everyone's holiday plans!