As Christmas approaches, some of the people at La Salle, including several students and staff, reveal their holiday traditions for the season and what it means to them. The Falconer spoke to seven members of the community directly and here’s what they found out.

Junior David Sharyan

During the holidays, junior David Sharyan and his family host an annual Christmas Eve dinner with their loved ones.

Occasionally, they make an Armenian dish called Ghapama, a stuffed pumpkin, baked and filled with rice and mixed with dried fruits and nuts, which is sometimes served with honey, sugar, or cinnamon.

Although his family are not big decorators, they love to watch Christmas movies, especially “Home Alone,” and blast Christmas music in the house to get into the spirit, his favorite Christmas song being “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee.

”Christmas music [is] basically the same stuff year after year, but it never gets old,” Sharyan said.

A place Sharyan loves to visit during the season is Los Angeles, California, where much of his extended family lives. There, he enjoys seeing zoo lights with them and building snowmen with his older and younger sisters.

Sharyan and his family love making hot cocoa. They get hot cocoa sticks from Trader Joe’s and cozy up the warm electrical fireplace.

“It just ties into that Christmas spirit, where it’s like that warm feeling inside of you,” he said. “We all love that … drinking some hot cocoa, seeing some beautiful Christmas lights, and enjoying the presence of God.”

French teacher Ms. Amanda Barker

French teacher Ms. Amanda Barker and her husband enjoy the Christmas holiday at home watching Christmas movies such as her favorite, “Elf,” and old classics like “Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph” while spoiling their little dog with treats.

However, when she is back in Nebraska with her family, they enjoy playing board games and trivia games while eating Swedish dishes like köttbullar which are Swedish meatballs, and potatiskorv, a sausage made out of meat, potatoes, and a variety of spices.

Their family uses recipes of these dishes from her great grandmother.

Having a sweet tooth, Ms. Barker also loves eating treats like Bûche de Noël, a French dessert, and the cookies that her grandmother bakes during the season.

“She would make all different kinds [of cookies],” she said. “She still sends me a box of them.”

When she was little, one of the traditions her family would have in her household is finding the pickle ornament in the Christmas tree.

How this would work is that there would be a pickle-shaped ornament in the tree, and whoever found it would be rewarded extra presents — this made her and her brother eager to find it. However, their parents would make sure it’s a gift they could share so the other wouldn’t be upset if they lost.

One of Ms. Barker’s favorite memories from Christmas is waking up as early as four in the morning with the excitement of seeing presents in the living room.

“Just like — that anticipation,” she said. “Sneaking around with my brother, thinking we were being sneaky, [and] looking at all the gifts that Santa left.”

Freshman Ximena Carrillo

Freshman Ximena Carrillo wants to spend time with her friends for Christmas and looks forward to getting presents for them this season as well. 

Her favorite thing about the holiday is Christmas day. 

“My entire family comes together and we celebrate what we love the most,” she said. 

Though she is hoping to see some snow this upcoming break, she looks forward to her annual baking tradition of Christmas sugar cookies and chocolate-covered pretzels. 

To make the chocolate-covered pretzels, she uses long pretzels, dips them in white chocolate, and tops them off with peppermint candy canes, cashews, chocolate, and sprinkles. 

Another tradition she enjoys is when she and her family make advent wreaths, pray the rosary, and set up the nativity set every year. 

“It also gives me a true deeper meaning on what Christmas is to me and my family, so that’s why I love it,” she said.

Her favorite place to go is The Grotto because she gets to enjoy the beautiful lights and see the La Salle choir. The Grotto is a Catholic outdoor altar and sanctuary located in the Madison South district of Portland.

Christmas is Ximena’s favorite holiday. She loves to decorate her Christmas tree, eat apple pie, drink hot cocoa, and laugh while watching “Home Alone.” 

“I honestly love all the decorations and the joy and excitement throughout the years,” she said. “I feel like every year since I got older, I just find the true meaning of Christmas even deeper as I grow up.” 

Junior Adina Dominitz

People celebrate Hanukkah in many different ways. This includes lighting the menorah, playing dreidel, eating fried foods, giving gifts, singing songs, and giving to charity. 

Junior Adina Dominitz enjoys celebrating this holiday with her family. She likes how it’s spread out throughout eight different nights, represents hope, and gives her family something special to look forward to while bringing them together. 

“Each night we’ll say some prayers and then we’ll light a candle, and we’ll light one more candle for each night,” she said. “We build up until eight and at that night it’s super cool because they’re always shining bright and very pretty.” 

Another thing she enjoys and that is unique to her tradition is playing dreidel. A dreidel is a small four sided spinning top with a Hebrew letter on each side, typically used in a traditional game played at Jewish festivals for Hanukkah. She typically plays to get the most candy. 

Her favorite memory was when her brother came back from college for winter break. She hadn’t seen him for a while, so it was special to her because she could spend time with him. 

During the holidays she has gone to Australia once, and sometimes visits Washington, D.C. and the East Coast to visit family. This holiday season she is excited to go to Laredo, Mexico to relax on the beach and be in the sun. 

To prepare for the holiday season she loves to bundle up on the couch and watch TV and movies with her family, specifically “Harry Potter.”

Some traditional foods she partakes in are latkes, which is a potato pancake, and matzo ball soup, which is a chicken soup with dumplings made from matzo meal. 

Her and her family always choose an organization to donate to for Hanukkah to help her community. They have supported World Wildlife, Red Cross, and organizations that address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Palestine. 

To her, the holiday season is a time to relax, take a break from regular life, and spend time with family. “Appreciate what you have and give to those who don’t have as much,” she said.   

Religion teacher Ms. Jane Nitschke

She really appreciates the meaning of Christmas, celebrating it as the birth of God’s Son and valuing the time it brings to gather with family.

Her favorite place to visit is The Grotto because of how beautiful and gorgeous it looks when it’s all lit up. She sometimes goes to listen to particular choirs there as well. 

She loves the decorations, music, and breaks that Christmas offers, but she is equally drawn to the spirit of Easter as well. At the heart of it all she says Christmas is about being together. 

“I just want to be with my family, and I want to have just some laughter and joy, and that’s pretty much all I want,” she said.  

Sophomore Daniel Garbitelli

Every Christmas, sophomore Daniel Garbitelli drives to his grandparents’ house to spend a weekend there. It’s one of his favorite places to visit. That, and the mountain, when he goes skiing. 

He still remembers the first pair of skis he got, and why that memory is so important to him. “I was really looking forward to skiing with my dad, since I didn’t know how to ski and I liked hanging out with [him],” he said.

A few of his traditions include decorating Christmas cookies with his younger siblings, a Christmas countdown where he gets candy or some sort of sweet each day, and a scavenger hunt leading to a family gift or treat. 

On Christmas day, his mom makes cannoli — his favorite dessert — and they sometimes eat crab as their main dish.

Christmas is Garbitelli’s favorite holiday, and he likes to listen to Christmas music to help himself get into the holiday spirit. He likes Frank Sinatra’s “Jingle Bells.”

To him, Christmas is important because, “I’m Catholic and I celebrate it religiously along with my family,” he said. “It’s the day when Jesus was born to save us from our sins, so I would definitely find the religious aspect of Christmas to be important to me, but it’s also important to be able to meet up with family and have a meal together.”

Main Office Administrative Assistant Ms. Sara Robles

Main Office Administrative Assistant Ms. Sara Robles often spends Christmas with her three children at her husband’s fire station. This year, her family is renting a house out of town to have Christmas dinner with her son.

Because her husband is a firefighter, they sometimes had to switch around their Christmas schedule. “When the kids were really little, if my husband had to work Christmas morning, we even lied and told them that it was actually Christmas day the day before so that he could be home with them when they opened their gifts,” she said. 

One of her and her kids’ most fun Christmases was Christmas Eve at the fire station when the firemen moved the fire trucks outside so the kids could play hockey in the firehouse.

She, along with her family, watches many Christmas movies during the holidays. They always watch “Christmas Vacation” together, she watches the newer “The Grinch” movies with her daughter, though she loves the original, and watches “White Christmas” with her eldest son.

A place Ms. Robles would love to visit for Christmas would be Europe. She thinks it would be cool to see all of the European markets during winter. 

Every year, her mother makes the same “grandpa cookies,” cookies made with peanut butter, cornflakes, and corn syrup. She also makes sugar cookies, monster chocolate chip cookies, and rocky road cookies.

Her favorite part of Christmas is to “get out all the decorations with my kids and remember all the little things they made,” she said. “We laugh about all the funny little ornaments we made when we were young, and the pictures of the kids that they made on their ornaments when they were little.”

This year, she wants a new pair of Danskos or a Nespresso machine.

Senior Jillian Craeton Raddle

Senior Jillian Craeton Raddle loves how celebrated and enjoyably festive Christmas is. She especially appreciates how the Christmas season seems to last longer than any other holiday season. 

For her, there are a few things she absolutely has to do every winter season. 

First, ZooLights. “ZooLights is a must for me,” she said. “I try to go every year with my friends and my parents.”

Second, visiting her grandmother — whom Craeton Raddle calls Nonna — every year for a big family dinner, always on Christmas day, and always with a turkey and a ham. 

Craeton Raddle also loves going up to the mountain to ski. “I love going with my dad because he’s not a very good skier, so he makes me feel a lot better about myself because I’m not a very good skier,” she said. 

She also remembers last year, when she went to Mount Bachelor, there was a food cart serving bao buns. She described them as the best things she had ever eaten in her entire life.

Decorating is also a crucial part of Christmas for her. She said she decorates her car with Christmas themed things.

Christmas is one of her favorite times of the year because of what the holiday means to her. “It’s a time to be with your loved ones, but not just to be around them, to really connect with them and feel loved, and so that they can feel your love,” she said. “I think it’s just a time to bring people together, regardless of if you believe in Christ or not.”