...and which ones are you more than happy to let go? Are you creating new traditions with your friends and/or family?
My family is of Polish and Czech origin. Apparently fasting on Christmas Eve was expected in "the old days", although that always seemed optional to everyone except my dad. One year, as a smart-ass teen, I cut a star shape out of cardboard and covered it with aluminum foil. I taped it to a post in the carport and proclaimed, "Look, it's the first evening star! Now we can eat!" Christmas Eve dinner, like Fridays during Lent, was supposed to be meatless, and always involved saurkraut. I'm not a fan of the cabbage concoction, so that's not a tradition I plan to carry on.
One tradition I do plan to continue is the sharing of oplatki
http://www.oplatki.com/
http://www.iarelative.com/xmas/oplatki.htm
My husband, when he first began to celebrate Christmas with our family, was somewhat amused that we continued to hold onto this tradition-- once he found out that we all anticipated it with a little bit of dread each year. Or at least a touch of awkwardness. The tradition is to extend your embossed, flavorless white wafer to each person gathered around the table, and offer that person your good wishes for the coming year. Then that person would break off a piece of your oplatki, extend his or her own oplatki, and do the same for you.
The challenge is to come up with something non-lame to say to family members you only see at Christmas. Kids often are likely to hear, "Hope you do well in school", and older family members, or those known to be struggling with health issues, are wished good health. At least one year I decided it was frightfully clever to offer "Live long and prosper" as my all-purpose oplakti-offering phrase.
The point here is it's awkward. But we continue to do it. Even after my grandmother died--and I guess a lot of us figured we were only continuing this tradition for her benefit--we continue to share oplatki. I know we'll be doing it tomorrow--I was there when my mom picked up the wafers at church.
Hmm--now that I've already used "Live long and prosper", how about the words of the great ones, Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan, "Be excellent to each other--and party on!" Nah, that's more of a group greeting. Must keep thinking.
I like that my kids are growing up with a touch of my family's history and traditions. We won't keep all of it--I'm not going to make them fast or eat saurkraut. In fact, I don't even require that they go to church, because I'm afraid that would backfire and make them resent it.
Without doing so intentionally, we have begun to develop our own traditions. We bake Christmas cookies every year to give to family and friends. I've experimented with different recipes, but there are a few types that the kids have come to expect and enjoy helping with. We have the cherry shortbread dipped in melted chocolate, the peanut butter cookies that they press Hershey's kisses into when they are hot out of the oven, and Christmas tree shaped cookies that they spread with green frosting (powdered sugar, milk, and food coloring) and shake sprinkles over for ornaments. And last but not least, the ones my kids call "family cookies", with three different kinds of chips (chocolate, vanilla and butterscotch) to represent the diversity of our family.
How about you--what traditions do you maintain at this time of year, and what new ones are you starting?