There's a couple of ways you can take in the holiday season. You can be all bah-humbug about it and try to make it disappear as quickly as possible, or you can turn it into something unique and fun that you look forward to.
I actively went from the former to the latter last year. It was a particularly difficult season for me since it was the first one without my mom. Instead of going with my instinct of just ignoring the whole thing and becoming a hermit, I decided to take the season by the reigns and try to turn my experience around.
Being married with no kids, I hadn't really had to create my own traditions before, so I decided to jump in and give it a shot. I took on some of my mom's and also made up some of my own. One of the best things we did was create an experience based advent calendar. My husband and I divided up the even and odd days of December and created little surprises for each other throughout the month. We did everything from attending a quirky Christmas play to making a new festive dinner to holiday drink bar hopping to playing hooky and going to a co-ed Russian spa mid-day.
It was a blast and definitely made us look forward to December this year and doing it all again. Now, I am totally on the tradition wagon since I see how beneficial it can be. I like having fun and interesting things to look forward to once a year. Now I don't want to be a maniac about keeping everything exactly the same forever, so if some traditions fizzle out we can just make up some more as we putter along.
Do you get into traditions? What are some of your favorites? Share below.
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I enjoy getting ready for the Holidays the best, time with my immediate family, baking cookies, putting up the tree and decorating it. Each year my mother buys us all an ornament something that represents something from the year, each ornament has a memory attached to it, I think of these as we decorate the tree.
Relaxing, spending time with my family, drinking wine, eating lots of delicious food and catching up on my sleep.
We have a traditional English roast on Christmas night. We open our Christmas "Crackers" all at once at the table and we wear the silly paper hats all through dinner.
The even/odd day surprise is a great idea!! I don't have a sweetie this Christmas so instead, I'll make an effort to do something Christmas everyday starting today. It may make me feel less Bah Humbug.
Since I'm a young person -- in my 20s and living in NYC -- I like having a mix of old and new traditions, as well as others that reflect where I currently live. I really enjoy the tradition of travelling home for Christmas, and spend one week (through Christmas Day) with my family and then fly to visit my partner and his family for one week. I really like having the extra-long vacation and spending it with family. I also like going to see the tree at Rockefeller Center and going up to Bryant Park and walking down Fifth Avenue to see the holiday decorations and the store displays at Macy's, Saks, etc.
Since my partner and I have only spent two Christmas seasons together (this year will be our third) we're still making our own, new traditions, like making sure to bake cookies, make some presents to send out to our extended family, and making our own Christmas cards the weekend after Thanksgiving to usher in the winter holidays. Living in a tiny apartment with a cat allergic to pine, we haven't been able to get a real tree, but make do with a large Christmas cactus and red fabric draped as a "skirt" and our presents to each other (and our cat :) ) stacked around the tree as they are bought and wrapped.
My parents have decided that their new Christmas traditions do not include my favorite: seeing extended family and cousins. As a result, I'm doing it on my own, and enjoying it completely.
Since I'm single, I still spend Christmas with my parents. We all put a lot of thought into stocking stuffers, so those are opened first. Then we make Swedish pancakes and eat breakfast together before opening presents. It's really leisurely and relaxing. Unless the weather is really awful, we also go for a walk later in the day.
I've been trying to make some traditions of my own, like a dinner party for my friends every December with a White Elephant and lots of games.
Our tradition since I can remember is to celebrate a family friend's Christmas Eve birthday by going skiing. We start the morning at a diner on the way for breakfast. Then we travel to the ski hill where the first run includes group photos followed by Christmas carols and champagne in the trees. It wouldn't be Christmas without a day on the slopes!
And SippingDaisies, Swedish pancakes are the best!
My boyfriend and I each bring home a different holiday brew on or two nights a week in December and have them while we do the tree or wrap presents or whatever. Also, we watch Christmas movies every Sunday morning until Christmas- helps get me in the mood to address New Years card envelopes.
Our family tradition used to be dressing up and going out to dinner on Christmas Eve, and I always looked forward to it. Now that the family has expanded, I asked my mom if we could start a new tradition (I thrive on tradition). Starting this year, we will celebrate Christmas Eve by cooking our way through our heritage (we have a LOT to pull from). This year, we will celebrate our Ukrainian heritage with pierogies and cabbage rolls and borscht. Then we will draw a country from a hat to find out what next year's cuisine will be. A good way to honor our ancestors as a family, I think.
I don't just have a Christmas/Holiday Tree, I have a This is our LIFE Tree - For years I've collected ornaments when I go on vacation, instead of a souvenir. And at Christmas time, my partner and I exchange, one ornament each that represents something meaningful to us that year. i.e., when I was teaching art, I got an box of crayons ornament. So each year when I put up my tree, it is more than just ornaments, it is a reflection of the life we have lived. It always feels so good.
We would always decorate the tree on Christmas Eve, then go to midnight mass.
We splurge for Christmas Eve and order crab legs from New Sagaya Market in Anchorage. More expensive than buying them from the local Costco or grocery, but OMG sooooooo much better. The whole family sits around talking and cracking them open.
This is a tough question. I just moved away from my hometown so I'll be spending the holiday away from family. I must say that I'm looking forward to the numerous Christmas parties thrown by friends and different departments at work. Yummy snacks galore, gotta love that tradition!
Our annual Nightmare Before Christmas Party!
Hmm, I just realized I no longer have any Christmas traditions. Now that my brothers have wives/girlfriends my family has had to change the holidays.
Our big family tradition is to have some sort of fondue (cheese or meat) and follow that with the opening of presents after dinner on the 24th (We're German so Christmas for us is on the 24th, not the 25th.)
Ordering in cheese pizza and watching Home Alone!
My husband and I always celebrate Christmas alone on the eve of the 23rd. We split Christmas eve and Christmas day between our families so the 23rd is always ours alone :) He proposed on "our" Christmas.
We went and cut down our own tree on the 1st this year instead of grabbing one from a local lot, and I think that is going to be our new tradition as well.
On the 24th (German here), we go to church, eat Raclette, and then play board games, with some rule attached that if x happens, whoever it happens to gets to open a present.
On the 25th/26th/27th we used to go visit my grandparents, but this year my parents are hosting both those events (with all available aunts/uncles/cousins) at their house, so it's definitely gonna be a busy couple of days...
Now that I am married to a Christian, I miss the traditional movie-and-Chinese food on Christmas day (actually, we always had Indian, but you get the idea.). I do love all of the Christmas traditions, though--the special meals, the Christmas crackers and their corny jokes, the cookies and mince pies (my husband's family is British)--and I am enjoying introducing our children to some new traditions, like goIng over our holiday cards from years past.
We do an advent calender where each day has an activity for us or the kids to do. Here is our list: http://snugglebuguniversity.blogspot.com/2012/11/advent-calender.html
In my role as grammar police--It's reins as in horse, not reigns as in kings.:-)
We don't really have any Christmas traditions ... it's just the two of us and no relatives. It is nice to plan a different meal and watch a few movies at home though. We're just not very "ritualistic" at any time of year.
I think traditions happen when you're not trying to make them happen. You try a recipe that goes over really well, so you do it again next year, and then bam -- it's suddenly a tradition. You take the kids on a special outing a couple years in a row, and you suddenly can't imagine the holidays without it. My favorite new tradition just started last year.
Background:
1. My sister has always half-jokingly complained of middle child syndrome -- that everything she gets is smaller, not as pretty, not as good.
2. Several years ago, I knew she had bought me a pair of sunglasses for my birthday. She knew that I knew, so she took the sunglasses out of the case and replaced them with a small rubber chicken so that I would still have a surprise when I opened it. Boy, was I.
So, last Christmas, when my mom gave her a bottle of her favorite perfume (like she does every year), there was a small rubber chicken in the box instead of perfume. I had also bought myself a normal-sized rubber chicken "from Santa", and we proceeded to compare the chickens at length (mine was bigger, squeakier, better all round).
This year her new yoga bag comes with a chicken wrapped in a mat. I think there's a rubber chicken Christmas ornament in her future, too. I pretty much spend an inordinate amount of time scheming places I can spring chickens on here at this time of year.
Love @akay's whole new rubber chicken tradition!! What fun!! .... Reminds me of that semi-famous story of the 2 brothers who kept giving each other the same pair of unwanted pants each Christmas, and as the pants got more and more threadbare and the guys grew older and had more money at their disposal, their methods of delivering the pants got more and more elaborate (stuffed in pipe, concrete, a smashed car, etc., etc.). You can read more about it on Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/pants.asp
We always spent a few days having a Hickory Farms summer sausage with cheese and Ritz crackers as a late night snack. Tacky, but even now I still get one every other year or so.
For the past 4 years, ever since I moved on my own into a small village, I have been playing Secret Santa for a nice cat lady who is widowed and cancer-stricken. Every year, I drop on her doorstep the Christmas basket I get from work complete with foie gras, a bottle of wine, fancy bread, sweets for her and treats for her rescue cats...
@nicefrenchgurl - that is an amazing thing to do! Good for you!
We don't have many traditions b/c our little ones are still young but I'd like to start our own. Too often I find as adults we follow suit to what our parents and grandparents did when we were kids and wind up compromising our idea of how we'd like to spend the holidays. Now that I have my own kids I'd like to create some of our own as well.
3dogma beat me to it... :)
In my family, we always drink champagne and eat a whole mess of finger food on Christmas eve (very Mermaids). We have a lot of fun finding new, odd hor d'oeuvres in the freezer aisles or making our own. My dad is in charge of ornaments and buys us one, typically bizarre, ornament each year based on some facet of our personality or life that year. When we were little and couldn't wait, we were allowed to open presents from our siblings on Christmas eve, but as we grew in age and patience, we let that go.
My sister's birthday is on Christmas, so our traditions were always split between celebrating Christmas and celebrating her. She died in 2011 and last year we took a tropical vacation to get as far away from Christmas as we could. We're home this year and will have birthday cake for dessert in her honor. I know the holidays are tough for everyone who's lost someone so I'm curious, how do you guys incorporate a loved one's memory into your holiday traditions?
One of my favorite holiday traditions was the ornament swap. Every xmas each family would buy ornaments for the kids of the other families which meant all the cousins ended up with 3 new ornaments each year. It was a fun, inexpensive way to still exchange gifts with the extended relatives and meant we all had pretty sizable ornament collections by the time we hit college. I'm thinking of starting it up again for my growing collection of nieces and nephews now.
Other than that we have pretty standard traditions--cookie baking/decorating, loooooong Catholic mass, get-togethers with all the extended family. I also always try to have a xmas movie night with The Nightmare Before Christmas, Christmas Vacation, and Muppet Christmas Carol.
We aren't religious, so none of our traditions are related to that.
I decorate the weekend of Thanksgiving and take things down New Year's Day. (This is partly because I love the glitz and partly to correspond with time off from my job.)
Pre-Christmas traditions include trying to find a silly but carefully chosen gift for my partner, such as this year's glowing tip Dumbledore "elder wand". (He's 50, so the 'meant for 10-year-olds' is the joke part.) (I'll bet he still loves it, though!)
Also, baking nutball cookies and honey peacn bar cookies a week or two before the holiday. (I used to make cookies with the cookie press every year, too, but they aren't delicious enough for the calories, these days, as the other two kinds definitely ARE! yum!)
Croissants and orange marmalade for a late breakfast on Christmas morning.
Holiday music while opening our gifts. (We don't exchange many, since it's just my partner and me. When I lived alone, I just opened what I had by myself, and gave the cat something new to play with.)
A fun holiday (or not) DVD while the food cooks.
Then a nice sit-down dinner, with chargers, sparkling grape juice or cider in fancy goblets, a delicous meal (turkey breast, pork roast, or beef roast, typically) with our favorite side dishes and a tasty dessert -- maybe cheesecake.
Sometimes we go to a new-release movie in the afternoon. Sometimes we loaf around playing with the pets, napping, whatever.
Low-key, pleasant, with just enough novelty to make it seem like an event.
the true meaning of Christmas! Bon Noël !