Family Christmas traditions worth starting this year

A tradition is not an elaborate thing. It is an ordinary thing you did twice on purpose and once more because somebody asked. That is the entire mechanism, and it means the ones that survive are almost never the expensive ones.

The traditions that last share three properties: they cost little, they work across a wide age range, and they do not depend on everybody being in one house.

Traditions for the weeks before

1. One decoration a year. Each child chooses or makes one ornament annually, with their initials and the year on the back. By eighteen they have a box, and when they leave home it goes with them. This is the highest-return tradition on this list.

2. The December list. A shared note where anybody can write down something somebody else mentioned wanting. It makes next year's gifts better and it costs nothing.

3. A cheap advent that is not chocolate. Twenty-four folded notes, each with one small thing to do that evening. Read a chapter. Walk to see the lights. Phone a grandparent. Some days say "nothing tonight" and that is allowed.

4. The annual photograph, in the same place. Same wall, same order, every year. Uninteresting for a decade and then quietly the most valuable thing you own.

5. Make the gift for one person. Each year, one name is drawn and that gift has to be made rather than bought.

Traditions for Christmas Eve

6. One gift, opened the night before. Traditionally pajamas. It works because it gives the evening a shape.

7. The same film, every year. It does not matter which. It matters that it is the same one.

8. Something hot, in the same mugs.

9. A walk after dark to look at other people's lights. Free, works for every age, and gets small children tired at exactly the right moment.

10. The letter to open next year. Everybody writes one sentence about the year, seals it, and it is opened next Christmas Eve.

Traditions for the day

11. Someone reads something. A poem, a passage, the same paragraph every year. Thirty seconds, and it marks the start of the day as different from the rest.

12. One at a time. Opening gifts individually, while everybody watches, takes far longer and is far better — the person who chose the gift gets to see it land. With small children in the room, do theirs together first and the adults one at a time afterwards.

13. The card, always. A rule that every gift comes with two or three handwritten sentences about why it was chosen. This one quietly changes the whole character of a family's gift-giving, because it makes the choosing visible.

14. A game everybody can play.

Traditions for afterwards

15. Five minutes, between Christmas and New Year, writing down what happened. Who came, what was funny, what went wrong, who drew whom. It takes almost no time and it is the only record that will exist.

The best day to start a tradition is a year before you want it to feel like one. Do it this year without announcing it, do it again next year, and by the third it will be something your family has always done.

What makes one fail

Three things, reliably:

• It depends on one person doing a lot of work. If it only happens because one adult stays up until two, it will not survive that adult being tired.
• It does not scale. A tradition built for four does not work at fourteen. The good ones either shrink or stretch.
• It cannot travel. Families spread out. A tradition that only works in one house has a shelf life; one that can happen over a phone call does not.

The ones on this list were chosen with those three tests in mind.