Make Your Own Holiday Tradition
A special pair of essays on the things we've started doing to commemorate the season.
To celebrate the season, a pair of essays exploring the traditions we’ve implemented in our own worlds around this time of year.
It’s a busy and stressful and expensive and harried time of the year, but it’s also filled with such wonder and magic. We hope today’s newsletter reminds you to slow down and savor it, to let the little things go in favor of soaking up the whole thing.
Happy, happy holidays! x Leah + Hannah
Physical Memories Build Your Family’s Legacy
Words by Leah Melby Clinton
Someone asked me about any holiday traditions we had earlier this month, and I didn’t have much to say. With young children, a plane ride away from most of my family, we celebrate on a small scale. I love the intimacy and the relaxed comfort that comes with it, but thoughts about things like "tradition" make a corner of my heart ache for a big boisterous crowd filled with cousins and uncles and grandparents and family friends.
As I sat with the idea of searching out a tradition worth sharing, I circled the realization that they needn’t be big things. It’s not about family lore or things passed down over generations. They can be small and brand new, something you stumbled on and so enjoyed that you keep repeating it.
The tradition Hannah shares in her essay below has inspired me: It’s easy to implement and doesn’t require a generation-strong crowd but will build out the pillars of what this season means for your family (no matter how big or small).
I hadn’t figured out what to write about until it hit me last night while I was in the middle of my own.
This is the second year I’ve used some of the quiet pockets around the holiday to build a physical photo album that collects the passing year. It didn’t start with an eye to becoming tradition (rather, anxiety about all of our memories living in the cloud and a Black Friday sale on the heavy leather albums I’d coveted). I wouldn't have thought of it as one, either, until this prompt and the accompanying search made me realize that the act and the feelings it allows are nothing if not a tradition.
Holiday-wise, New Year’s can seem like it belongs to the young. It’s parties and staying up late, drinking too much and thinking about what to wear. Once you’re retired from that stage of life, and especially with young children, it can feel like a joke of a holiday (and I can’t remember the last time I was awake to shout, “Happy new year!” in that particular singsong way).
That’s true—and I’m excited to put on a sparkly dress and drink too much one day in the future when my children are older (maybe with my children??!)—but I’ve also recast New Year’s. It’s not a holiday about a party, but reflection. The closing of a year is the ideal time to look back and remember, relive, and appreciate.
I’ve done it in some way for as long as I can remember, including my serious preteen years when I’d curl up with journal and pen. Newer for adult me is the similarly quiet act of putting together a family album, a “chore” that requires you to look back and remember everything that happened.
The process is simple (though it seemed to intrigue people—I made a quickie Reel when I realized lots of people were thrown by how to even order physical photos). Looking back through the pictures is a big part of the magic, from deciding which to print to securing them on the page.
How much you can fit in a year: the grocery store runs and the poolside-snacks, the visits to cousins and walks around the neighborhood. When you’re smack in the middle of anything, you can never see it for what it is (which makes appreciating it hard). Each time I’ve made an album, I’ve fallen deeper in love with the life we have; everyday and special moments alike feel even more precious with the distance of time. And because it’s just the year prior, everything isn’t that far removed. I can still remember. That random Friday morning at the pool with my youngest? It wasn’t a throwaway day or a way to pass the time but something bigger.
It was a moment in this life, a map-dot entry on the planet when he and I were in the sunshine, together and happy.
The meditative act of wading through everything we did has become a tradition that starts with me but fans out to all the members of our family. I’ll hold up my laptop with a, “Remember this?!” as I order photos, then hover near my daughter when she turns the heavy pages of the completed book.
I hope it’ll be a record for them, forever. A physical love letter they can return to even when I’m gone.
It’s not a sequin dress or a champagne flute, but this way of celebrating the ending of a year is so much better. It’s in-the-moment magic that allows me a front-row seat to all the goodness that’s marked the last 365 days.
Looking back and forward is a split that’s hard to manage, but when you can? It’s the recipe for a good life—and one you appreciate.
A Family Code
Words by Hannah Weil McKinley
I was midway through Christmas week last year, when I started panic-shopping at an outlet mall in Maine, overcompensating for a remote holiday and the fact that I didn’t come with ample presents. In hindsight the stuff I bought on a whim doesn’t even crack the top 10 of the things my children play with. A panic-induced mall trip was a reaction to some underlying mom guilt or some unsettled stuff from my own childhood that bubbles back up this time of year; but when I sit with the holiday traditions I want my children to grow up with, this isn’t it. Sitting around opening presents isn’t ever the best part.
Instead, I come back to this:
