Curating Meaningful Holiday Traditions and Celebrations
An Event Planner’s Reflection and 5 Tips on Building Joyful Memories This Holiday Season
Holidays mark our days and years with poignant experiences and memories to ground us in the celebration of life. The smell of my mother’s sopa de caldo after midnight mass is the beginning of Christmas. The taste of yellow rice with beans is a sense of plenty to share throughout the holiday season. The feel of twelve frozen grapes between my fingers means we’re just about to usher in a healthy new year. Some of my most cherished childhood memories are from the holiday season spent with my family and loved ones.
Today, holiday traditions are a mix of the old and the new. Like my mother and grandmothers, I celebrate holidays with food, drink, and music. We honor my family traditions of Colombian hot chocolate and white cheese and Guamanian finadene holiday sauces. We ring in the New Year by hosting a Trinidad style fete which brings the celebrations of my husband’s childhood into our adult lives. And some of our family traditions simply reflect our own lived experiences. Our Christmas tree is topped with a Christmas cowboy hat reminiscent of my father-in-law who always wore it to hand out gifts. We go to as many German-style Kris Kringle markets as we can find because I fell in love with them when my military parents were stationed in Germany.
When it comes to celebrating this time of year with friends, my husband and I love to host a dinner party followed by a game of Xlephante, which is our personalized version of the white elephante gift exchange. Xlephante has grown into a beloved annual tradition that includes special homemade dishes, an ornament exchange, and a meaningful gift exchange followed by an evening of music, joy, and fellowship.
Celebrating holiday traditions make this time of year especially memorable and as we begin our second pandemic winter holiday season, I have heard so many folks wrestling with how to make the season special. Whether you’re safely joining up with big groups of family and friends or celebrating in smaller ways. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or any other occasion throughout the next few months, I want to share some advice and tips that I believe will help to make your celebration special at any scale.
5 TIPS FOR CELEBRATING HOLIDAYS AND BUILDING TRADITIONS IN 2021
Bring everyone into the vision upfront in accessible ways. Maybe this is asking everyone coming to a holiday dinner to share one dish they’d love to bring or hope to enjoy. Perhaps this is meeting with your children and asking them what tradition they would like to start as a family this year. For a gift exchange, it may be as simple as setting a budget limit that everyone is comfortable with. However you bring folks into the vision, it helps the tradition or event to feel like it belongs to everyone involved.
Designate a host, a planner, or both. Chaotic holidays can be fun, but usually there’s some sort of method to the chaos that makes it fun. No one wants to show up for a 7:00 New Years Dinner that isn’t ready until 10:00! The planner can create the timeline, the roles and responsibilities, and make communication easy and fun. Sometimes the planner is the host. Sometimes the host is whoever has a big enough dinner table to fit everyone, and they may not be the person with the interest or skills to plan the event. Talking about this upfront will make the planning and the time together smoother and more fun!
For in-person events, decide COVID protocols in advance. Will your family and friends be wearing masks, require vaccination or a quarantine time period in advance of time together? None of this should be a surprise, and as hard as it can be to talk about handling things in different ways, it’s still better to talk about in advance so that your time together is focused on each other. For anyone who won’t be able to make it, find ways to include them remotely - whether that’s a 30-minute zoom call or a box in the mail with well wishes from the group - it will mean a lot to folks who are isolated this holiday season to know you are thinking of them!
Consider a mix of old and new. For so many of us, holidays are about food, music, and time together - and we want to celebrate it all! You and your family or friends may also want to do something new! Consider complimenting your tradition with something more active - like an adventure, an opportunity to volunteer together, or giving gifts to a charity instead of each other.
Share the meaning behind each tradition. For some, there is deep cultural or family significance. For others, there may be more whimsical meanings behind your traditions. Part of celebrating them is remembering together, or sharing with new family members or friends, the origins and meaning of traditions. Why do we walk around the block with a suitcase at the new year? To signify a year of adventure and travel ahead. Why do we give everyone a hershey kiss? To make sure no one is left out when folks pair up at the stroke of midnight! Why do we serve mulled wine? Just because we like it.