That has been my description of the past several holidays. It always elicits an eyeroll from my wife with a corresponding “that doesn’t make sense” comment. Which, I agree, the phrase is somewhat nonsensical.
The words “new” and “tradition” don’t usually fit within the same sentence. A tradition, in the traditional definition, is something that happens without much change more than once, whether it was intended to be recycled or not. New is obviously the antithesis of that.
This is my sixty-fifth holiday season. I recall very little of the first few. However, once I got married and built a family, I was in a lead role for creating our holiday traditions. Back then, what we did one year was highly predictive of what we would do the next year.
When I was newly married with young children and all our parents (their grandparents) were alive, Thanksgiving and Christmas mostly had the same agenda year after year. Thanksgiving was when multiple generations gathered (20-30 people) together for pot-luck meals and football in the front yard and on TV. A smaller group attended Christmas Eve service then came to our house to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and wake up to stockings and gifts under the tree. Even my tradition of shopping on Christmas Eve was baked into the expected process.
As my father, father-in-law, and other relatives passed away and our children became adults with their own families, each year was different. Gatherings were smaller and in various locations at different times. We generally knew what we were doing and with whom, but the timing and sequence was often a puzzle we pieced together real-time. Honestly, I wasn’t a fan at first. I missed my traditions from the past, but having a “blank slate” each year also brought a new sense of adventure.
This year followed the same newness pattern over the past decade or so. For the second straight year we drove up to Raleigh to visit my brother-in-law’s family at Thanksgiving, but with only one functioning car it required a rental to fit passengers and luggage. I spent Christmas Eve overnight in the hospital with my best friend who just had back surgery after a truncated dinner that was not at our usual Japanese steakhouse location. Christmas morning was a direct drive to pick up my Mom to go to – not our house, as usual – my daughter’s house. On the day after Christmas, we bought a car.
Regarding a new annual tradition, 2025 told all the previous years to “hold my beer.”
Fortunately, one tradition has remained for several years – watching “A Christmas Story” on endless loop on TNT / TBS and waiting for the most predictable but memorable scripted line ever in a movie … “Oh my God, I shot my eye out.”
Does any of this sound familiar to you? You have a vision in your head of what should happen, an expectation that how it’s been is how it will always be. Then, suddenly or gradually, it changes. To be clear, I am not trying to equate being able to go to Helen GA every Thanksgiving to life-altering events like death or catastrophic injury. But I have found that how you respond to “little” things is a predictor of how you will respond to “big” things.
Being able to adjust to change is called resilience (“the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”). It is what we ask injured workers to have as they progress towards recovery. It is what we all learned we had – or didn’t have – during COVID. It is the difference between dwelling on the past and cherishing their memories as you create a new future.
This is being published on January 2, 2026. Yes, a new year. It is impossible to know what will happen over the next 363 days, what will remain the same / as expected and what will change – for the better or worse. One thing you can count on IS change.
Are you prepared for the new annual tradition that is coming your way?
