Most years, we maintain plenty of family holiday traditions from our childhoods, such as baking Christmas cookies and fruitcake, decorating the tree, counting down with Advent calendars, and eating things like lasagna for Christmas dinner and bacon buns somewhere during the holiday season. We often do puzzles and play games, especially on New Year’s Day, and generally spend intentional family time.

But, lately, we also seek out new traditions that we will enjoy, such as building a Christmas village (IKEA got us started, at a discounted price!), having down time between Christmas and New Year’s to evaluate the year gone by and prepare for the next one (this is mostly me), and watch cheesy Christmas movies (also me). (I swear there are more new traditions that I’m not thinking of.)

One of the great things about having or creating your own family is that you can take what you love from your own childhood and life, and build on it (and drop anything that doesn’t work). We will do more for Christmas when we don’t have cats (if that day ever comes) in the form of lots more decorating, but many of these extra decorations are fragile, and we have one cat who climbs on everything.

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