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Christmas.

It means different things to all of us, and over the years these things change. I doubt very much if anyone’s Christmas remains the same from childhood to adulthood even if only the roles change as we get older. That said I suspect we each have little traditions that we do at this time of year, even if you’re not someone who celebrates this festival.

Some of these might date back to childhood and have followed us all the way through to adulthood, others might be more recent. For many years I’ve read Dicken’s Christmas Carol or one of his other Christmas stories in the run up to Christmas itself.

There are also a few that stopped or changed when a particular relative passed away or became unable to do them. My Grandma always used to make our Christmas puddings (plus Brandy Butter and Rum Butter). She had her own recipe for the pudding, and would batch make them often so that there would be one for different members of the family. This then fell to my Mum and ultimately to me. I know that the recipes are very different, even if I couldn’t tell you exactly how.

I think this is also true of other times of the year or for certain things. They’ll be a goto family member for certain things in many families or a particular tradesman who’s always used for something. Until recently we had a goto gasman who did our boiler services etc. When he decided to retire we had to find someone else. With many of these types of things there’s an element of trust – that they’ll do good work, won’t overcharge, etc, etc,. Often though it’s a recommendation from friends or family in terms of who they use.

This year having recently moved it seems like we’ll be having some slightly new traditions or variations on a theme. I don’t think that we’ll have properly settled into Christmas in our new home this year and we’ll be having a very quiet celebration. We have found all of our decorations amongst the myriad of boxes that we still haven’t managed to unpack, and we have a tree and limited other decorations.

So what if anything are your traditions? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.