New Traditions Could Spice up the Holiday Season

Traditions draw people together, provide a sense of identity, and add texture and character to otherwise ordinary days. A healthy respect for tradition means preserving it and, at the same time, creating some of your own to leave your mark.

9 Reasons to Create New Holiday Traditions

Creating new traditions during the holidays can be fun in the right measure.

1. Old Traditions Reflect Past versions of Ourselves

Traditions give us a connection to the past, but since people and families change, we sometimes need an upgrade. In giving ourselves permission to adapt and change, we’re actually doing the real work of building a strong culture among our family and friends.

2. New Traditions Keep Life Feeling Fresh

Sometimes inherited traditions feel lifeless or forced for the next generation. That doesn’t mean those traditions failed—they may have served their purpose perfectly for the time and people they were initially meant to serve. New traditions breathe new life into a group and are a release valve against the weight of past decisions.

3. New Traditions Can Build on Old Ones

Building new traditions is not an either-or decision. Instead of ending an old tradition and starting a new one, it’s often better to see if you can adapt the old to fit today’s needs. That act of preservation is an integral part of the give-and-take that makes traditions so beautiful.

4. Existing Traditions Are Not Written in Stone

While I have great respect for traditions, I don’t feel they ought to be blindly carried forward. Traditions are not moral requirements—they are just the defaults and preferences of one group at a particular time. The beauty of a tradition that lasts is that the next generation finds something useful in what they see, or something beautiful in what they experienced, and wants to keep it alive.

5. New Ways Reflect Our Current Family Life

While it’s sometimes fun to imagine yourself as part of a long, unchanging lineage, that is not the reality we live in. In our modern world, each generation changes a good deal from one another as technology, culture, and society change around us. Today’s traditions should be geared toward preserving what is good about life today and ensuring it can be passed along for as long as possible. Even if the next generations start their own traditions, they will have been raised in the ideas of the previous traditions, and so preserve something of their values.

6. Creating New Traditions Encourages a Sense of Ownership

Just like a strong country needs good institutions to pass along its ideas and values, a friend group or family ought to have traditions that do the same. However, if each new generation never gets to build these traditions, they will never feel as invested as the founders. That’s why a healthy society needs old and new institutions, just like a healthy family or friend group needs both old and new traditions at different stages of their service.

7. New Traditions Involve More People Collectively Telling Their Story

Traditions are among the most powerful ways to tell your family’s story, especially during holiday seasons when the whole family is together. Making a new tradition is an inherently creative act that involves deciding what’s important and what you want to prioritize. It’s good to draw from old traditions as a starting point, but that shouldn’t be where you end. New stories must be told to keep the flame alive.

8. New Ways of Being Draw People Together

It is a common observation in religious circles that opening a new church attracts people who wouldn’t have found their way to an existing one. There is something compelling about being part of something new and fresh that applies equally to new traditions. New ways might reengage family members who previously found themselves on the outside looking in, just as the old traditions keep the older generation engaged in family life.

9. New Traditions Lower Comparison Pressure

The holiday season comes with pressures that develop from gathering people close together and all the details that must be worked out. What we don’t need is the added pressure to live up to the way things used to be or to perfectly replicate a tradition that was once a pillar of the family. Unfortunately, this happens and can be a large source of cross-generational family drama. A simple solution is to allow traditions to evolve naturally, while also adding new traditions as a release valve for those with new ideas.