Seasonal Traditions
My grandmother kept a tin of butter cookies on the kitchen counter from the first of December until New Year's Day. Not because she'd baked them — they came from the grocery store in a blue tin with a Danish scene on the lid. But the moment that tin appeared, the holiday had officially arrived. The calendar was irrelevant. The tin said so.
I have been thinking lately about how much of what we call "the holiday season" has drifted away from us. Not the commercial version — that seems more aggressive every year, starting earlier, demanding more, generating noise at frequencies that rattle your fillings. I mean the quiet version. The rituals that cost nothing and ask only for your attention.
Leon is not here to tell you how to celebrate. That is none of my business. But I have been collecting small traditions for the better part of six decades, and I have noticed that the ones that stick tend to share certain qualities: they are unhurried, they involve your hands or your nose or some other sense that the internet cannot reach, and they tend to produce that specific feeling of being exactly where you are supposed to be.
Here are twelve worth your consideration. Take what fits. Leave what doesn't. Maybe one of them becomes a tin of Danish butter cookies for someone in your life who hasn't been born yet.
Leon Says:
The holidays are not a problem to be solved with enough spending. They are a mood to be constructed, slowly, out of small repeated things.
Keep one specific candle — same scent, same brand, ideally the same candle stub if it survives — that you light only in November and December. Cedar, cinnamon, beeswax, woodsmoke. It doesn't matter which, only that it's yours. The smell will arrive in your memory before the flame does.
Simple PleasuresOrnaments are stories you've put into cardboard. Don't unpack them alone. Let whoever is in the house be present when the tissue paper comes off the one from Niagara Falls, or the lopsided clay handprint your kid made in second grade. The box is not decoration storage. It's memory storage.
FamilyThe rest of the month can be potlucks and catered events. But pick one meal — one — and cook it start to finish with actual ingredients and real time. Pie crust from butter and flour. A roast that took two days to brine. The labor is the point. The kitchen smelling like that specific combination is irreproducible by any other means.
KitchenNot for exercise. After dinner, after the dishes, when the neighborhood has gone quiet — put on a coat and walk a few blocks. Look at the lights in windows. Notice which houses are lit up and which are dark. The cold air and the silence do something no amount of holiday music can replicate. You return a different person than you left.
SolitudeSend at least five paper cards this year. Not with a pre-printed message and your signature. With one sentence you actually wrote — something specific to that person. "I still think about the afternoon we spent on your porch in 1998." That sentence will survive in a drawer long after you've both forgotten what it was about the porch.
ConnectionPlay the same album every year at the same juncture of the season. Not because it's the best holiday record, but because repetition is what transforms music into ceremony. After ten years, the opening notes arrive before you've finished pressing play, inside you, and the year collapses into a comfortable stack.
MusicOne gift — just one — that cost you hours rather than dollars. A jar of jam you put up in August specifically for this. A framed photograph printed at the drugstore from your phone. A knitted hat that took three tries to get the right size. The recipient may or may not prize it. You will be changed by having made it.
CraftPick one day — Christmas Eve, New Year's afternoon, the Sunday after Thanksgiving — and agree that the screens stay off. Not as a punishment or a demonstration of virtue, but as a deliberate choice to see what rises up to fill the silence. Board games. Conversation. Someone picks up an instrument. Someone reads aloud. The house becomes the thing, not the window onto other houses.
PresenceSomewhere between Thanksgiving and New Year's, write down what happened this year. Not accomplishments. Not gratitude lists (though those are fine). Just what happened — the argument, the trip that didn't go as planned, the afternoon that was inexplicably perfect. Seal it in an envelope. Put it in a box. Open it in five years.
ReflectionAt your main gathering — whatever that is, whoever is there — ask the oldest person in the room to offer a toast. Not a prepared one. Just something off the top of their head. The improvised toasts are always the best ones, and you will spend the rest of your life wishing you'd recorded them. You can't. That's part of why they matter.
MemoryIn a world that values novelty above almost everything, the radical act is repetition. The same tablecloth your mother used. The same green bean casserole recipe that hasn't changed since 1977, the same one everyone pretends to find boring while eating three helpings. Sameness is not failure of imagination. It is continuity of self.
RitualBefore anyone else wakes up, or after everyone has gone home — fifteen minutes with a cup of something warm and the window and the first day of the year. Nothing needs to be resolved. You don't have to be hopeful or regretful or wise. You just have to be there, in the quiet, which is in fact the only place where any of this makes any sense at all.
SolitudeNot all twelve traditions belong to the same moment of the season. Some are specifically Thanksgiving work. Some ripen in the Christmas weeks. Some come into their own only at the transition from December to January.
You may be reading this in a household where the traditions were lost somewhere in a move, or a divorce, or a death, or simply in the drift that happens when you stop paying attention for a few years. The right response to that is not to acquire twelve new traditions at once. Pick one. One. Do it this year. Then next year, do it again. That's the whole recipe.
My grandmother's Danish butter cookie tin showed up every December and sat on the counter being slowly emptied. The cookies were nothing special. Buttery, yes. Unremarkable, honestly. But when my grandmother died and we cleaned out her kitchen, someone found that tin in the back of a cabinet. It had been waiting, I think, for the first of December.
Nobody had the heart to throw it out. One of my cousins took it home. I don't know if she still puts it on her counter every year. But I would not be surprised. That's what a tradition is: something that outlasts the person who started it, still going, still saying the same thing — which is roughly that you are here, it is this time of year, and you are not alone in having arrived at it.
The holidays ask a lot of us. They ask us to feel things on schedule, to be joyful when we are sometimes only tired, to be generous when we are sometimes only broke, to be grateful when we are sometimes only sad. The small traditions I've described don't fix any of that. But they give you something to hold onto when the season starts to feel like something that's happening to you rather than something you're a part of. They are, at their best, a way of saying: I was here. I noticed. I did this small thing again.
Which is, when you think about it, most of what we can offer each other.
Leon Says:
A tradition you start today is a tradition that will outlive you if you're lucky. That's not a small thing. Start one this year.
For further reading on slow, intentional approaches to everyday life, NPR's family storytelling series is worth an evening, and the Smithsonian's history archives have wonderful pieces on how American holiday traditions formed and shifted across generations.