Day 7 of Blogmas 2025 continues, because apparently I’m committed to this self-imposed December marathon of daily holiday-themed posts. For newcomers, Blogmas is my annual exercise in festive endurance where I post Christmas content every single day until December 25th. This year, I’m letting AI generate my prompts because I needed an impartial taskmaster to keep me honest. Today’s prompt: Share your top 5 Christmas traditions—either from your family growing up or ones you’ve made for yourself.

Here’s the thing about Christmas traditions: we talk about them like they’re permanent fixtures, carved in stone like commandments. But they’re not. They’re more like sandcastles—beautiful while they last, shaped by specific circumstances and specific people, and inevitably washed away by the tide of time. The five traditions I’m about to share all exist in the past tense now, which might make this post more melancholic than festive, but that’s the reality of traditions. They belong to specific moments in time, and when those moments pass, the traditions either evolve, fade, or become memories we polish until they shine brighter than they ever did in reality.

1. Christmas Eve at Mamaw and Papa’s House

Of course this makes the list. How could it not? If you read my post from December 4th, you already know about the rotating Christmas tree, the smell of pipe tobacco mixing with Christmas dinner, the basement gift exchange. This wasn’t just a tradition; it was the gravitational center around which all other Christmas traditions orbited.

Every Christmas Eve, without fail, the extended family would converge on that house at the foot of Tinker Mountain. The tradition was so consistent that individual years blur together in memory—was it 1987 when Mamaw decided to cook breakfast for dinner or 1988? Did Uncle Linwood give Mom that “nose award” plaque in the mid-80s or early 90s? The specifics don’t matter because the tradition created its own temporal bubble where every Christmas Eve was somehow both unique and identical.

The ritual never varied: arrive in the afternoon, kids immediately dispatched to the basement to stay out of the way, adults gathering in the kitchen and family room, Papa in his recliner with his pipe, Mamaw orchestrating the chaos with the efficiency of a seasoned general. Dinner at six, present exchange after, home by ten to prepare for Santa’s arrival.

This tradition lasted from my earliest memories through, give or take, my early thirties. It survived changes in employment, relationships, and addresses. It survived new additions to the family and, heartbreakingly, subtractions. It survived until it couldn’t anymore. Papa passed first, then finally Mamaw in 2023, and with her went the last thread holding this tradition together.

The house belongs to someone else now. The basement where we opened presents is probably a home gym or storage space. The rotating tree is long gone. My cousins have scattered to different states, their own children creating new traditions in new places. We still gather sometimes, in different configurations and different locations, but it’s not the same tradition—it’s an echo of one, like hearing your favorite song covered by some pop singer and played in a different key.

2. The Progressive Santa Videos at Valley View Mall

This one requires some context for the young folks: there was a time when visiting Santa at the mall was an Event with a capital E. You dressed up. You waited in line for what felt like hours. You sat on a stranger’s lap while he asked what you wanted for Christmas, and your parents paid an astronomical amount for a single Polaroid photo.

But for five or six years in the late 80s and early 90s, Valley View Mall in Roanoke had something special: Santa’s helpers would video record your visit. Not just a photo—actual video, with sound, capturing whatever nonsense you decided to tell Santa that year. And here’s the genius part: each year, they’d add the new visit to the end of the previous year’s tape.

So by year five, we had this bizarre time-lapse documentary of my sister and me growing up, one Santa visit at a time. You could watch us go from tiny kids who actually believed to older kids who were clearly just going through the motions for the sake of tradition (and possibly the candy cane at the end).

The Santas, God bless them, got progressively more disturbing with each passing year. The first Santa looked like he’d stepped out of a Coca-Cola ad. By year five, we had a Santa whose beard was attached with visible spirit gum, whose “ho ho ho” sounded like he was suffering from emphysema, and whose overall vibe was less “jolly old elf” and more “mall employee counting the minutes until his smoke break.”

The video itself became more entertaining than the actual visits. We’d watch it every year, laughing at our younger selves, critiquing the Santas (“Remember when that one asked if we’d been good and then stared at us for like thirty seconds without blinking?”), marveling at how much we’d changed and how much had stayed the same.

I have no idea where that tape is now. Probably in a box in someone’s basement, the magnetic tape slowly degrading, those progressive Santa visits dissolving into static. Even if we found it, I doubt we have anything that could play it anymore. But for those five or six years, it was appointment viewing, as essential to Christmas as the tree itself.

3. The Christmas Eve Letter Exchange with “Santa”

This tradition had two parts, both equally important. On Christmas Eve, after we’d returned from Mamaw and Papa’s, my sister and I would write a letter to Santa. Not a wish list—that had been handled weeks earlier. This was a thank you note, written in our best handwriting, expressing gratitude for his impending visit and directing him to the cookies and milk we’d left out (location varied by year, depending on furniture arrangements).

We’d leave the letter by the cookies, go to bed, and try to sleep despite the electric anticipation coursing through our bodies. Then, on Christmas morning, after the presents had been opened and the wrapping paper carnage had settled, we’d find Santa’s response.

Santa, it turned out, had terrible handwriting. Shaky, uncertain letters that looked like they’d been written by someone wearing mittens. Or by someone using their non-dominant hand. Which, I learned many years later, is exactly what was happening. My mother, probably exhausted from playing Santa until 2 AM, would write these responses with her left hand to disguise her handwriting. The cookies? Messily eaten by my father, purposely leaving plenty of crumbs behind as evidence.

The letters were never long—Santa was busy, after all—but they always responded to specific things we’d written. If we’d mentioned being good that year, Santa would acknowledge specific good deeds. If we’d asked about the reindeer, he’d provide a brief update on Rudolph’s nose situation. They were personalized, thoughtful, and utterly convincing to children who desperately wanted to believe.

I found a few of these letters years later while going through old boxes. My mother’s commitment to the bit was admirable. The shaky left-handed writing, the references to North Pole weather conditions, the gentle reminders to be good next year too—she’d thought it all through. It’s the kind of parental dedication that you don’t fully appreciate until you’re an adult and realize how tired she must have been, how much easier it would have been to skip this elaborate ritual, but how she did it anyway because it mattered to us.

4. The Christmas Coffee Table Book

Every family has objects that only appear at Christmas—the special plates, the good tablecloth, the angel that tops the tree. In our house, one of those objects was a massive coffee table book filled with Norman Rockwell paintings and holiday stories.

I wish I could tell you the name of this book, but it’s lost to memory. What I remember is its weight—heavy enough that as a small child, I needed both hands to carry it. The cover was tan with red lettering. The pages were thick and glossy, the kind that stuck together slightly when the book had been closed for eleven months.

The tradition was simple: when the Christmas decorations came out of storage, so did the book. It lived on the coffee table from the day after Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, and during that time, it was constantly being opened, browsed, read from.

The Norman Rockwell paintings were windows into an idealized America that probably never existed but that we all agreed to believe in for December. Families gathered around pianos, children peering down stairs at Santa, tired shopkeepers on Christmas Eve. Each painting told a story, and my sister and I would make up elaborate backstories for the people in them.

The written stories were a mix—some classic Christmas tales, some obscure ones I’ve never encountered anywhere else. There was definitely “The Gift of the Magi” and probably “A Christmas Carol” in some condensed form. But there were also stories about Christmas in other countries, legends about the origins of various traditions, poems that weren’t “The Night Before Christmas.”

The book disappeared at some point during one of my parents’ moves. Or maybe it just fell apart from years of use. I’ve looked for it online, but without knowing the title and with only vague memories of its contents, it’s impossible to find. There are a thousand Christmas coffee table books out there, but none of them are the Christmas coffee table book, the one that appeared every December of my childhood like a reliable friend.

5. 24 Hours of A Christmas Story

This tradition wasn’t born from family history but from Ted Turner’s programming genius (or laziness, depending on your perspective). Starting in the late 1990s, TBS or TNT would run A Christmas Story for 24 hours straight, beginning on Christmas Eve.

This became the soundtrack to Christmas for me. Not music—Ralphie’s quest for a Red Ryder BB gun playing on eternal loop. It didn’t matter what else was happening, that movie was on somewhere in the house. Wrapping presents? “You’ll shoot your eye out” in the background. Cooking dinner? The leg lamp was being unveiled in the living room. Family gathering? The Bumpus hounds were destroying the turkey for the hundredth time.

The beauty of the 24-hour marathon was that you never had to commit to watching the whole movie. You could drop in and out, catch your favorite scenes, ignore the parts that dragged. It was ambient Christmas, always there when you needed it, never demanding your full attention.

I knew the movie so well that I could tell you what scene was coming based on the music alone. I could quote entire sequences. I knew exactly when to look up from whatever I was doing to catch the best parts. It was comfort viewing in its purest form—familiar, predictable, reliable.

I still watch A Christmas Story every December, but it’s different now. Streaming means I have to make the conscious choice to put it on. There’s no marathon to drop in and out of, no sense that millions of other people are watching the same scenes at the same moment. It’s the same movie, but without the communal ritual that made it special.

The Tradition of Letting Traditions Go

Here’s what they don’t tell you about traditions: they’re only as strong as the people and circumstances that maintain them. When those change, the traditions either adapt or die. And maybe that’s okay.

These days, I don’t really have Christmas traditions, not in the way these five were traditions. Being single with no kids means there’s no one to create that consistency for, no one to pass traditions down to. After Mamaw passed in 2023, even the extended family gatherings have become sporadic, more “we should try to get together” than “we always get together.”

I’ve got Blogmas, I suppose—this annual December writing marathon that I’ve been doing for a few years now. But even that’s flexible. I’ve been blogging for 20 years and only started calling it Blogmas recently. If I miss a day or decide next year to skip it entirely, the world won’t end. It’s a tradition without stakes, which might mean it’s not really a tradition at all.

And you know what? That’s fine. Not everyone needs to be the keeper of traditions. Some of us are meant to be the memory-holders instead, the ones who remember how things used to be, who can tell you about the rotating tree and the progressive Santa videos and the coffee table book that only appeared in December.

These five traditions shaped my understanding of what Christmas means, even if I don’t actively practice any of them anymore. They taught me that Christmas is about consistency and rhythm, about marking time with the same actions year after year until those actions become sacred through repetition. They taught me that the magic isn’t in the traditions themselves but in the people who maintain them, the mothers who write letters with their left hand, the grandmothers who rotate their trees, the TV executives who decide to run the same movie 12 times in a row.

The traditions are gone now, but their echoes remain. Every Christmas Eve, I think about that house at the foot of Tinker Mountain. Every mall Santa makes me remember those progressive videos. Every coffee table book in a bookstore makes me look for tan binding with red letters. Every time I catch A Christmas Story on TV, I wait for my favorite scenes.

Maybe that’s what traditions really are—not the actions we repeat, but the memories we carry. And if that’s true, then these five traditions aren’t really gone at all. They’re just transformed, from something we do into something we remember, from present tense to past tense, but still present, still marking time, still making Christmas Christmas.

Even if it’s different now. Even if it’s quieter. Even if the traditions these days are more about remembering than doing.

That’s still a kind of tradition, isn’t it?

What traditions have you held onto during the holidays? Let me know in the comments below!