Holiday Traditions Part VI

Speakers: Laura Cole, Director of Advancement. Britney Tyner, Advancement Data Administrator. Cindy Barnes, Classroom of the Earth Co-Director

Laura Cole: My favorite Christmas tradition is when we go on the carriage rides to go see the Christmas lights with our whole family who lives in Texas, which altogether is 11 people. And it's really fun.

Cindy Barnes: So for Christmas traditions in our house, you know, we have a lot of the same ones, we like to go look at Christmas lights. Of course, we put up a tree. But one of our unique traditions is our Christmas goat. So my family background is Scandinavian and my grandmother when I was little gave my family a Christmas, a Scandinavian Christmas goat. So this is a goat that is made out of straw and wrapped, usually with red ribbon and they're put out at Christmas as a decoration and I was little and I thought it was just the funnest thing I had ever seen. It's got braided horns on top. My brother and sister, however, who were teenagers thought that it was terribly ugly and tacky and the worst thing they had ever seen and thus started our battle. I would always take the goat and lovingly place it in somewhere on the mantle or on a shelf or right on the coffee table, some place where everyone would be able to see it and my brother and sister would then take it and put it somewhere else. Now my mother very quickly made the rule that they couldn't actually hide it because I would get very frustrated. But they had to put it somewhere where you could see it just by looking, but usually it was sort of tucked away, you know, in a place where you would put something you didn't want people to see very often. So under a chair or just behind, a shelving unit or something like that. Flash forward to my adult years. and I was able to rescue the goat from my family's, Christmas decorations and it lives at my house now and my Children have enjoyed that story and continue the tradition. They continue to hide it in new places, and tuck it away and I find it again and put it above our fireplace in its place of honor. Now and again, in Scandinavia, it's very common in Sweden and Norway. It's very common for people to have, small Christmas goats in their house as part of their decorations, but there's also larger ones as well. In the town of Gavel, which is in Sweden, there is what they call the Gavel goat and it is a very large straw goat that they make. They first build a frame that it is formed around. I wanna say it's probably at least 10 to 20 ft tall. It's quite large and, and it's there, it's beautiful, but there is a tradition in the town of people trying to burn it down. And so there are people in the town who like to burn it down and people who like to protect it. It's a battle every year. I think in the last 50 years that they've had it something like 35 times. It's been burned down, there's a great Wikipedia article about it and it'll tell you what has happened every year to the goat. Last I checked it was still standing this year. But, I'll be honest, I haven't checked for a couple of days, so I'll have to check when this is over. So that is the larger, tradition that, we didn't even realize for years was part of our family's tradition at Christmas. So glad to share the holiday memory with you guys and I'll talk to you later.

Britney Tyner: For the past few years. What I like to do is grab Chinese food. I always get combination Lomein and as many crab Rangoons as I can manage. I sit down and I pop on a scary movie, Krampus, Jack Frost the scary one, Bram Stroker's Dracula. I love the holiday season. I love like the vibes that I get from being in this wonderful, warm, comforting environment. But then something about eating my favorite food and putting on my favorite genre of movies that has made it like a tradition for me for the last few years. So I'm really looking forward to doing that again this year.