Well, not exactly ANTI.

Does your family have Christmas traditions? Do the same things every year, eat the same foods, have the annual rituals that must not be tampered with or risk having the entire holiday “ruined”?

Our family never really did.

Between my mom being an RN in a hospital working weird shifts when I was growing up, and the fact that our extended family always lived in different states than we did, our holidays were never consistent.

Sometimes we were at my Jehovah’s Witness grandparents’ home on Christmas Day, which meant that it really wasn’t Christmas Day for us.

Sometimes my mom worked on Thanksgiving Day and my dad would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – I remember eating them on china in the dining room one year to make it “fancy.” :)

Sometimes we did our own Christmas a week before or after the actual date because we would be out of town.

Once our house was flooded by a waterbed [true story] just before Thanksgiving, so we ate at a restaurant and lived in a hotel until the week before Christmas. [Donuts every morning and someone who makes your bed while you're gone every day? Awesome.] Oh, and the flood rusted our artificial Christmas tree so we had a teeny tiny desk-top size one. :)

One year we went to the Shedd aquarium in Chicago on Christmas Day – a fond memory of mine!  Another year we decided to go see a movie and bought the tickets online… to the wrong theater… got slightly lost… and since all the restaurants were closed, we ate “lunch” in the car – frozen convenience store foods heated up in the gas station microwave!!  And oh, how we laughed!!

This is not to make you feel sorry for me in any way… I actually am very grateful for this!

I think this odd every-year-is-different pattern actually was our tradition. :) In some ways, I think this was a reminder every year that Christmas is more than tradition – we celebrate Christmas because of Christ. We love to celebrate His coming together, to show our love for one another in gifts and time together… and it doesn’t matter where we are, what we’re eating, or how big or small the Christmas tree is!

I am so grateful for the extreme flexibility of my family. To this day, spending holidays with my family is made MUCH easier by the fact that all of us just pretty much go with the flow… the world isn’t going to fall apart if we do something different. I mean, really… what is “normal?” :)

So, as NP and I discuss traditions we would like to see in our family, I want to make sure that I pass along the tradition of being ok with not having a set-in-stone tradition. I want my kids to truly see that we don’t worship tradition at Christmas, we worship Jesus. And if we truly want to show love for one another, we won’t get hung up on insignificant details.

Enjoy your family rituals this Christmas… but don’t be afraid to scrap them and find a new plan.

Flexibility works for me. :)