How Do Traditions Become Traditions?

Over the years, my youngest brother has become the Tradition Police in our family, the one who makes sure that we don’t forget any of our established traditions at Christmas time: the usuals like putting out cookies and milk for Santa, and the family-specific ones like reading The Polar Express, lighting the candles on our small Venetian-glass Christmas tree as we listen to Handel’s Messiah, and opening our gifts in the right order, one by one, on Christmas morning. Traditions at Christmas time mean a lot to my family, which is why I find myself not looking forward to Christmas this year.

Because this year I won’t be with my family. It’s the first year that dh and I are spending Christmas without any extended family. And while dh is ecstatic, I find myself getting more and more depressed as Christmas gets closer. Yes, I have my new, small family to be with this year. The family that is my own, that I have chosen, created, and am working to build and nurture—and thank goodness we finally have a child with us to brighten everything. But since we’ve never spent Christmas alone, just the three of us, I don’t know what it’s going to be like. Will it feel like Christmas without all the things that have made up Christmas for me in the past? Although I love my own family’s traditions, and I’m sure we’ll adopt of few of those, I don’t want to just import their traditions. I want dh, dd, and I to start creating our own traditions.

So how does a tradition become a tradition? How does something you’ve never done before become something you do every year for the rest of your life? Obviously, you can just choose what will become a tradition. But how does that act you choose mean anything the first time you do it? How does it take on meaning for the people who create it? Traditions, after all, gain their significance from having been done before.

When I think about the traditions my family cultivated over the years—the ones that caught on and meant the most—they all seem to have an almost ritual-like quality to them. Something we do with the lights dimmed, with music playing, by the light of candles, as we sit together quietly listening to a story or a poem or singing together. Or they’re really fun. Which is why I think that a tradition can’t just be anything. It seems to me that it has to have the quality of a tradition; it has to be something worth repeating year after year, something beautiful, comforting, or fun that people will look forward to. Otherwise, it will just become something awkward and annoying, something that all the kids moan at when the yearly moment arrives. I suppose even the annoying moments can take on their meaning. But I hope that our new traditions can be moments that everyone looks forward to, moments that inspire one of my children to take on the role of Tradition Police, to become the keeper of the family traditions like my younger brother did.

What ideas do you have? I’m not necessarily interested in what traditions you’ve started in your families, I’m interested in how you came up with those traditions, how they got started, how you made them feel special the first time you performed them, and how they took on meaning over the years. Did it happen spontaneously? Were some of them planned? And any thoughts on starting truly Christ-centered traditions?