What’s your unbreakable holiday tradition?
My family has very … not strict, specific… ideas about Christmas. You do not open presents earlier than Christmas morning. You decorate like there’s a contest and your life depends on winning it. You bake as if Martha Stewart’s coming for tea. There should be least one gift that was so ridiculously hard to find the story sounds like Shackleton at the Pole. And you do not have a fake tree. If you are concerned about the environment, you get a small real tree in a pot and donate it to somebody after Christmas, but THOU SHALT NOT with the fake tree.
One year in college I put up a small fake tree in the dorm room, and out of all the stupid shit I’ve done in my life that was the thing that nearly got me disowned. My father wandered the place like Jacob Marley, muttering darkly about something called Christmas Hell, and it was only by promising to never, ever, ever again touch the unclean thing that I was able to finagle my way back into the will.
Course, this year we don’t have a tree at all, so possibly I am in for Christmas Purgatory.
A.