Christmas traditions are meant to evolve, otherwise they’re history.
It’s the wee hours of Christmas morning, our guests have left and whatever little energy remains is devoted to tidying up after an Eve of eating and drinking, kisses and well-wishes, tombola and poker. We unplug the tree and leave on the outdoor Christmas lights to twinkle bright through the night.
Milk and cookies are laid out, and consumed, but not completely. The stockings, after hanging idly for weeks, are about to be filled.
We pin our hopes on the children being asleep and set about the business of channeling Santa as slinkily as the creaky wood floors will allow. From our room, it’s six steps to the first stocking strung around the doorknob, a hard right, and nine more to the second suspended from the bedpost.
Maria and I try to be as feather-footed as snowflakes making landfall, even hold our breath when necessary. If our execution is closer to thumping snowballs, the kids never let it slip. We eventually sneak in our own respective stockings while the other is out of eyesight, brushing their teeth for instance, and marvel every time we regain the room at Mr. Claus’ timing and cunning. He did it again!
After some winks of sleep too few to constitute rest, it’s the bed mattresses’ turn to creak. Bedsheets rustling, arms stretched out, yawns drawn in, ears cocked to detect who’s awake. The sun’s come up in relief of the outdoor lights.
In our house, every Christmas morning since as good as forever has started with opening our stockings in one of the kids’ bedrooms, all gathering in our daughter’s until she married five years ago, then our son’s. He married in June.
We retired Santa’s milk and cookies once the kids got older. Everything else we unfailingly wrapped ourselves in year after year as if it were an heirloom quilt: taking turns prying the stuffing from our stockings, cueing Bing Crosby and Tony Bennett on the CD player, opening the presents slipped under the Christmas Tree overnight and capturing the moments on camera, unpacking the panettone and pandoro and releasing the darling aromas of raisins, candied fruit and confectioners’ sugar all through the kitchen before filling our bellies with all that buttery goodness, and finally, playing a few rounds of scecchu (Calabrese for donkey), a card game whose object is to avoid being saddled at the end with the lone unmatchable horse card, lest you be declared an ass.
The most personal Christmas morning traditions sometimes run past the well-considered best-before age — handmaidens to youthful innocence and the pull of sugar plum fairies. But who wants to outgrow Christmas mornings, anyway?
The point is all these years they served as comforting lighthouses, simply by being there, no matter the quality of their beacons. Traditions are beautifully indispensable, but their makeup isn’t nearly as important as having them in the first place. Our children and their families are now building their own Christmas traditions. Something borrowed, something new. That’s how traditions live on, by starting a life of their own.