Best Christmas Tradition

Roughly half of what people call Christmas tradition is unpaid labour that everyone has agreed in advance to enjoy.

Untangling a box of lights is not fun. Wrapping presents badly at eleven at night is not fun. Cooking for nine people is a full day of work that ends with washing up for an hour. And yet these consistently beat the genuinely restful options when people are made to choose between them, which suggests the effort is not a cost of the tradition but a large part of what makes something count as one in the first place. The traditions that survive are the ones that take something from you.

The list runs to thirty-two of them, running from the ones that occupy all of December down to the single hour on Christmas morning that the rest of the month is quietly built around.

What tends to happen in this bracket is that small specific things outlast big ones. Driving around to look at other people's lights does far better than it has any right to, and so does the negotiation over opening one gift early, which was never really about the gift.