Christmas gives you every kind of opportunity for fruitful family traditions to establish and grow your permafamily. You should take full advantage!
Plus, a merry family is a happy family is a family that lasts through the generations.
Good family Christmas traditions happen naturally. But you also need to introduce them from time to time and to pare old ones.
Your Christmas toolkit should include
Food traditions.
Stories.
Ties to heritage and extended family. This can be as simple as an ornament or an old model train from Grandpa and Grandma.
These traditions should be fun and ideally they reinforce your over all family distinctiveness. For example, if you are a family that emphasizes healthy, home grown food—really lean in to the food traditions for an amazing feast. If your family is musical, go caroling. If your family likes beef a lot, put home made jerky in the stockings. If being simple or thrifty is your family thing, lean into that—have lots of spontaneous fun with your kids and point out how simplifying traditions or being thrifty has let you do it.
Christmas is great because one of the keys to family identity is to do things that are distinctive but that receive lots of social reinforcement from the larger culture. Christmas traditions are exactly that.
Lots of the standard Christmas traditions you hear about can be fun, adopt from your childhood’s or just try something out and see if it works. You hear about another family doing the 12 Days of Christmas and want to try it, give it a try.
One of the traditions we really like is Christmas tree cutting. Ideally this happens at an actual forest, not at a farm, so you have some sense of adventure in the wild (but a farm is fine is that’s all you can get to). It reinforces a family preference for things that are real and genuine. The smell is lovely. It has heritage roots, it feels Christmasy.
Everyone has a great time picking out a tree and hauling it back. Bring a thermos or two of something hot!
And bring extra cords. It never hurts to have plenty of tie downs for getting the tree back.
We have fir, spruce, pine, even one year when we lived in the right area a pinyon. Some of them have been beautiful. A few of them have been Charly Brown Christmas tree style. We have loved them all.
This year’s tree is a blue spruce we cut on Tuesday in the snowy woods. Here in the process of being decorated.