There is one specific item I will forever associate with Christmas morning. It’s not presents, although I was always excited for those as a kid. It’s not something most people would usually think of alongside Santa and mistletoe. What I think about when I picture sitting around the tree Christmas morning is…cereal. Not just any cereal, the good stuff, like Lucky Charms or Cookie Crisp.

I know, that sounds a little strange, but my mom had pretty strong feelings about sugary cereals growing up. We never got them. Our kitchen cupboards held the standards like Cheerios and Shredded Wheat. Putting sugar on our cereal to liven it up was out of the question. Feeling rather sugar-deprived, our Christmas morning box of our favorite sugar-laden cereal was bliss to our little hands.

Okay, to be honest, I still got excited about our Christmas boxes of cereal as a teenager, even after my mom lightened up and started buying sugary cereal during the year. By that point, though, it was the tradition that mattered, not the cereal. The year my mom bought chocolate covered Belgian waffles instead of the expected boxes of cereal, we just about revolted. We still ate the waffles. I mean, who wouldn’t? We made our point, though, and the next year the boxes of cereal reappeared much to our delight.

As an adult, my kids would not be impressed by a box of cereal on Christmas morning. That would be about as cool as toothbrushes in their stockings—which given that I’m a dental hygienist, they’ve already warned me to think twice about. Even though the boxes of cereal I got excited about as a child have become a tradition that has fallen by the wayside for me, we’ve built new ones that my kids fully expect us to continue every year without fail.

What does our Christmas look like now, sans cereal? Every year on Christmas Eve we have a family party with all forty-something cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents where all the kids get to open one present. We read the Christmas story from the Bible, and then we watch “A Christmas Story,” which my kids fondly refer to as “that movie where the kid gets his tongue stuck to the pole.” Then my two little night owls snuggle into bed way too late and sleep away the hours until Christmas morning comes.

I love sharing the holidays with family and friends, even if I don’t get a box of cereal on Christmas morning anymore. To be honest, I don’t even like cereal now and rarely eat it. Despite that fact, a box of Luck Charms still makes me think of Christmas, and it makes me laugh remembering how my sister ate every single marshmallow out of the box and left all the cereal pieces. She was a teenager, by the way. What holiday traditions do you remember from childhood? 

DelSheree Gladden lives in New Mexico with her husband and two children. The Southwest is a big influence in her writing because of its culture, beauty, and mythology. Local folk lore is strongly rooted in her writing, particularly ideas of prophecy, destiny, and talents born from natural abilities. When she is not writing, DelSheree is usually reading, painting, sewing, or working as a Dental Hygienist. Her works include Escaping Fate, Twin Souls Saga, The Destroyer Trilogy, and Invisible. The first book in the Someone Wicked This Way Comes series, Wicked Hunger, is scheduled to be released through Clean Teen Publishing on April 1, 2014.

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