I am married to the Grinch, so basically nothing.
I agree that the funkiest tree is the one you remember the most. The one we got last year was a leaning, ugly disaster… the one we have this year is probably the nicest one we’ve ever had. Guess which one we laugh about and miss?
Ten years ago, I broke my leg three weeks before Christmas and did absolutely nothing to prepare for the holiday that year except to order some gifts online (and I was so stoned from the pain medicine that I forgot to have them wrapped). No tree. No turkey. Nothing. Nobody else took over those chores because nobody wanted to.
But I discovered that I like doing a certain amount of holiday stuff. So the next year, there was a tree again, and carefully selected gifts again, and some attempt at a holiday meal (although I can’t cook worth a damn). Quite possibly, I am the only person who appreciates any of this.
Holiday traditions evolve as families change. My two grown children now live in distant parts of the country. Twice, my son has been unable to visit us at Christmas. This year he is coming, but this year will be the first Christmas when my daughter cannot visit us. And times have also changed in that when my daughter does come, her future husband comes with her, and they spend only a short time with us because they have people from his family and various friends to visit in our geographic area.
I’m OK with all of this. I remember Christmas traditions evolving when I was young, too. After my parents got divorced, Christmas was celebrated in my mother’s household on Christmas Day and in my father’s household on Christmas Eve (which was especially nice for my father’s unmarried sister, who could be with us then but usually had to work on Christmas Day). Much later, after I had children, Christmas was celebrated at my father’s house for a while, but eventually I had to insist that we would stay home on Christmas Day and visit him on another day during the holiday week. It was simply too upsetting for the kids to open presents on Christmas morning and then not have an opportunity to play with them because they had to get dragged on a long car trip to Grandpa’s house.
And all of these changes are nothing compared to what my husband had to do as a young man. He grew up in a Jewish family, but when he was in college, his parents divorced and within a couple of years, each of them got married again, and in both cases, the new spouses were people who celebrate Christmas. Around the same time, he got engaged to me. I had divorced parents, too, and Christmas was celebrated in both of their households. So my soon-to-be husband suddenly went from zero Christmases to four. It took a few decades for him to adapt.
“It took a few decades for him to adapt.” LOL. That’s a lot to adapt to!
Our new Xmas tradition seems to be to argue about what to have for dessert with Christmas dinner. D2 won this year, we are having apple pie with ice cream & cheddar.
So far my kids still come home. I think this will continue until D1 has kids… not sure what we will do then. 
We celebrate Christmas as an extended family and there’s enough of a continuum of ages that there are usually small children to ensure that the cookies, carrots and soy milk are set out every Christmas Eve (my son decided when he was four or five that reindeer were lactose intolerant and that information has somehow been passed down to succeeding generations of cousins).
@Otterma – lactose intolerant reindeer – I love that! I remember one year (probably when my dad had to assemble something on Xmas eve) my mother set out cookies and beer for Santa.
“Our new Xmas tradition seems to be to argue about what to have for dessert with Christmas dinner. D2 won this year, we are having apple pie with ice cream & cheddar.” I give you permission to have multiple desserts. Because, dessert. 
I haven’t celebrated a christmas with an extended family in many years, my dad’s family used to get together on Christmas eve for the typical Italian feast of the fishes event (eat until you bust), but to be honest I don’t miss that. We have some traditions in my own little family, that we have held up, we get a live tree (most years go to a Christmas tree farm where my wife takes pictures of me cutting the tree, even if my S is not home he gets to see me trying to cut the tree and not have my pants ride down (middle age spread sucks…), and I do decorate the yard a bit. Christmas eve we will do things like play a favorite board game, and watch “A Christmas Story” at least once (even more relevant this year, since one of our rescue dogs is a bumpass dog to be certain lol), and likely we will eat our favorite christmas eve stuff, like bread and olives and cheese, have some champagne with it perhaps, maybe binge watch programs we haven’t had the time to watch. Christmas is generally a relaxed day, will listen to music, and for dinner we traditionally do a prime rib of beef (our two pups are going to go nuts, so will the cat lol). Nice part is no stress, no drama, just a quiet couple of days.
We have a “kids” tree in the family room. Each year, I’ve bought an ornament for them and they get put into their own boxes when the tree comes down. One day, they’ll take their ornaments to put on their own trees, but #1Ds apartment is too small, and #2 is back at home after graduating last week.
Christmas Eve has always been with the ILs, but they have decided that they can’t/won’t do anything this year, so something new will have to take its place.
Christmas morning is stockings, which are a big zeeba family thing. Family presents and breakfast in the middle of it all. #1D will come over, maybe with BF, and open hers.
So far, everyone is still around to do Christmas PM with my family. We alternate houses and all the kids are there. My mom is fiercely protective of this, and I don’t really know how it will evolve once she is gone. I do know that the cousins enjoy being together. They draw names for gifts and we open before dinner and have a white elephant exchange after.
Since our families are all local, things hang on, for better or worse. I’m leaving it to the girls as they get older to decide what they want to do. Our hope is to keep it drama-free.
Just saying, little and married, we were cookies and Coca Cola. Or as DH loved to play it, Co’Cola.
We light candles for our Menorah and eat latkes. Sometimes it works out that the d’s are around but sometimes not. this year we are going to Older d and boyfriend’s apartment on Saturday night as more convenient as they are travelling to spend Christmas with his family in Ohio and flying out Christmas morning. We don’t exchange gifts for the most part except little sorts of things they might like. DH and I never exchanged gifts and when we were both growing up the holiday which is historic, not religiously significant was not a gift-giving holiday. When my kids were little they did get 8 gifts but they were all small for the most part-books, puzzles, new Barbie doll, markers, etc.
Someone in our house has always sung in a church choir on Christmas Eve. Children’s choir. Adult choir. Some choir. So for at least the last 15 years, we have Chinese takeout after whatever Mass. There was one year, I switched up and tried to do some nice soups and breads. But I nearly had a mutiny. It’s been 5 years since then and I STILL hear the complaining about how I tried to ruin Christmas Eve. Oy.
We always save the stockings for after breakfast. This is a throwback to when my father was in assisted living and we’d have a Christmas Day brunch with him. We’d open the family presents at home but we’d bring his gifts to him and we’d open the stockings as a group. I don’t think my kids remember doing stockings any other way.
There are so many things that HAVE to be the same. Or my kids will just make them that way. We have certain decorations that need to be in the same place. Every. Year. My collections of Santas and angels grow every year. But the are generally in the same places.
As for the future, who knows. D is engaged and lives several hours away. She’ll be here this year sans FSIL. I think once she marries she’ll want a lot of the tree decorations. Several are already earmarked for her or S as they were gifts over the years. I still hang all their handmade ones (altho the one made out of Fruit Loops is down to just a few loops).
S is a lot less verbal about everything. But he single handedly decorated the tree and the rest of the house himself. Exactly as it has been done since he can remember.
I’m not yet ready/able to think how it will all go once they have their own lives and families.
The tree I remember best of all our holiday trees was the one where my mother took the office flagpole and a plywood table top, put the flagpole on the table top and stapled green ribbons from the top of the flagpole to the outside edges of the table. It was kind of like a green teepee and our Somali nanny said, “Oh it’s an aqal!” (Somali nomad hut.) We pinned the ornaments to the ribbons.
It does change when the kids grow older and have their own lives. H and I believe in being flexible and understanding that while we would love to have our kids with us every Christmas, it just won’t always happen. D is married and it’s only fair that sometimes the holiday will be spent with SIL’s family. We know what it is like to live far from our parents and not be able to go home due to work schedules, etc. We also know what it’s like to be the ones who make the effort when the road does not run both ways. So no demanding/ expecting/pressuring on our side. We are just happy when we do get together.
For us, when a tradition becomes a burden, we say goodbye to it and find a new one that we enjoy more. Why would you continue to do something that doesn’t bring you joy?
Time to find something meaningful to bring you joy, and you can look back with love and nostalgia on the things you used to do, while at the same time enjoying and exploring the new.
Ok, I just remembered New Year’s Eve we throw out bird seed into the mountains and quietly make wishes while looking up at the vast sky of stars. We started this years ago. It is refreshingly cold and fun.
We tag Christmas gifts as from another person. Instead of Santa (and we use him too), we choose a fictional character or a celebrity or a teacher or somebody who has driven us crazy during the last year. I finally figured out a way to include DD’s BF: “Rick Wakeman” will give him the vintage “Yes” Teeshirt.
I have used a different paper for each person. They learn which gifts/paper are theirs on Christmas morning.
I did forget the grid one year–so had to make a master sheet thereafter. It was an interesting
morning.
This all started because teen D would not leave her gifts that were under the tree alone.
We do the tag thing also but they are jokes like the box with a star wars mug will be labelled as being from Yoda