Adjusting Christmas traditions

Christmas baking has been one of my traditions ever since I can remember.  As a child I was an assistant in my mother's kitchen, but by high school I was doing my own, skipping a day of school every December to stay home and bake (which amused my vice-principle too much to give me detention for it).

I soon developed a set way of doing things, as I tend to do, but over the years I had to make some adjustments.  I learned to let my wife and kids and mother-in-law share my kitchen, not just as helpers, but as participants who chose and made their own recipes. I also began adjusting for my children's shorter attention spans by breaking up the baking into sections and spreading it over several days.

This year we had to make a fairly major adjustment to accommodate my wife's new mostly vegan diet.  We tried a whole different set of recipes, including baked pecan cookies with jam centres, raw pistachio and honey cookies, and sugar cookies made with coconut oil (though I still made the shortbread with real butter because, well, otherwise it wouldn't be short bread).

This process of learning to bake vegan reminded me (yet again) of how our traditions should be flexible enough to change as we change ourselves. Having traditions (like Christmas baking or anything else) is good.  They give us a sense of continuity and connection that is important to building strong and loving families. But if our traditions are too rigid, if they can't adapt to a child's attention span or a spouse's diet, then they can pull families apart instead of drawing them together.

This holiday season, take some time to think about whether your family traditions are really bringing you closer to one another. Maybe they do, and you can keep celebrating them as you always have. But maybe they need to be adapted to meet the changing needs of your family. Or maybe they should just be dropped altogether, at least for this year. Whatever the case, make sure that your traditions serve your family, not just tradition.

Luke Hill is a stay-at-home father of three boys, aged nine, seven, and three.  He has fathered, fostered, adopted, or provided a temporary home for kids anywhere between birth and university.  He has taught college courses, adoption seminars, camp groups, Sunday School classes, rugby teams, not to mention his own homeschooled kids.