The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity purposes.
On today’s Meet the Team, we’re going to get to know our Braustin employees a little bit better and hear what family traditions they’ll practice this holiday season.
Chloe: Hey Vee, do you have any holiday traditions?
Vee: I do, actually. My grandma makes special pinwheel cookies every year and that’s it.
Chloe: That’s it? Oh, that’s fun, though.
Vee: What about you, Chloe?
Chloe: Definitely cookies and milk right before bedtime, church Mass at midnight. And then, right before the kids go to bed, they get one present to open. And then, we all dress up Christmas morning in a theme like ugly sweaters or this year is onesies, so each family will judge a theme of the onesies and everybody gets to pick a prize, so that’s going to be fun!
Wynton: You guys are both family members, right?
Chloe: Yeah, we are.
Vee: Yeah. One year, we did ugly Christmas sweaters like Chloe mentioned, and we made them homemade, well, at least my family did, and we ended up winning that year!
Chloe: She did. She totally took the cake!
Vee: Yeah. And I think we won a money prize! One year we all picked a name from a little raffle type thing where we picked somebody else and we had to pick slippers for them. So, everybody got slippers that year.
Chloe: Hey Ellie, do you have any holiday traditions?
Ellie: I do, actually. We celebrate Christmas Day on Christmas Eve. For Christmas Eve, it’s for our family and friends, we open all the gifts that family and friends have given one another. On Christmas Day, that’s for the kids, it’s more of their Santa Claus gifts, we put a little ticket every single year of the names, so they know which gift is theirs. Since I could remember, we go to Christmas Mass at midnight and we’re there for at least an hour to two hours and we also eat at the church too, so we’re walking little penguins at the end, and then we just go home and we wait until the morning for Santa’s gifts.
Aaron: I have a pretty big family. I have an older sister and two older brothers who are all married and have multiple kids, so we get together usually the day before Christmas Eve, the 23rd, and what we do, the adults, is we have this huge saran wrapped ball that we put goodies in like gift cards, small shots of grownup drinks, sodas and stuff like that, just other fun prizes. So, what the trick is, you only have until the next person rolls the dice to roll doubles, but you have to open the saran wrapped ball with mittens. Usually, whenever you open the adult drink, you have to drink it immediately and there’s a couple of different things in there that you have to pass out to, but sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can also pull some cash or some gift cards or something like that. So, I highly, highly recommend doing that with your family!
Alberto: The first tradition to start off the holidays for us, the day after Thanksgiving, like clockwork, that Friday, we always go to the Pipe Creek Christmas Tree Farm. We’ve been doing that since the kids were really little and we do the hay ride and walk around looking at trees and figure out which one we’re going to either cut down or pick from other in the tent to take home. And then, we wrap the lights that Friday night, and then Saturday night, we decorate the tree as a family. From my wife’s side, making tamales before for Christmas. And then, for New Year’s Eve, her and the girls make bunuelos. It’s like a fried tortilla that you sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on it. And then, when we ring in the New Year, eating those with either hot chocolate for the kids or, Elsa and I usually have coffee.
Vee: Merry Christmas
Ellie: And a Happy New Year!
Chloe: From our Braustin Family to yours.
