Resolving to wake up in one's own bed on Christmas morning simplifies the holidays in all kinds of ways, especially if one has offspring.

Traditions I like and try to keep:
  • eating white pizza at an Italian restaurant on December 23, with Christmas crackers and paper crowns for all (to wear during dinner in public, yes indeed!).
  • making and giving (especially giving) candy cane reindeer. These are great little presents that let me give something to someone else but are so little that no one who receives one feels the need to give me anything back. I love that. So I make dozens of them (with a glue gun and tweezers, I can make 6 dozen in one evening with a few holiday specials on TV) and hand them out to coworkers, the cleaning staff at work, the people in the cafeteria... lots of people.
  • going to a caroling party that started... 35? 36? years ago; some of the group are now grandparents and bringing their grandchildren to it. Children take turns ringing the doorbells, we sing, often in harmony and sometimes with accompaniment (guitar and/or recorder and/or percussion), and then after singing, we eat, talk, laugh.


One of the best holiday gatherings ever -- one we all still talk about -- was the ornament-making party with my friends. This had to have been ... 20 years ago? People brought all kinds of different things to use to make ornaments; the bag of shells one of the guys brought was a huge hit. Oh, the things people came up with; we laughed ourselves silly that night!! A four-legged starfish and snail shell became a trapeze artist whose trapeze had broken (yes! This is a Christmas ornament!), and I hang a small singer made out of a snail shell on my tree every year and smile, remembering that party.

I think if I were to try to build traditions now, the ornament-making party would be one to aim for, perhaps in odd-numbered years with some other kind of gathering -- caroling, perhaps -- in the even-numbered years.