Among the many neglected lessons of history is that Christmas traditions change all the time. I grew up with the one that involves families gathered cheerfully around enormous meals and blazing hearths. It goes back to the days of Charles Dickens, yet if you read his 1836 sketch A Christmas Dinnner (written under his pen name of Boz) many traditional Christmassy things are either mentioned only in passing or completely absent. The sketch pre-dates the popularity of Christmas cards, crackers and trees, while in those days seasonal gifts were usually exchanged on New Year's Day. Father Christmas in his modern form wasn't invented until 1931. He's a transatlantic import, by the way.
Individual households invent their own Christmas traditions too. In mine, the custom in the run-up to the big day is for all six of my children to assemble in front of the telly and watch the 1994 re-make of Miracle on 34th Street (much superior to the 1947 original in my view and also provides an instructive insight into post-Cold War Christian American self-confidence, but that's another conversation). When I issued this year's invitation one of my grown-up sons queried it: "What tradition is that?," he inquired, slightly scathingly. "The one I made up last year," I replied.
Another new Yuletide tradition in my house is shopping at Palm 2 on Christmas Day itself. This one involves accidentally-on-purpose forgetting to purchase some useful food item or other in advance of the 25th December, thereby creating a pretext for nipping out for a breath of air after the presents have been unwrapped and witnessing Abdullah and company wearing their silly Santa hats - see my photo above of the store's popular in-house barista, taken yesterday. Christmas wouldn't be the same without it.
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