There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions. _-- Bill McKibben, author of Hundred Dollar Holiday I am a life-long Unitarian Universalist and I have always been some sort of Humanist Christian, in that I believe in the spirit of Christianity, that of Love of neighbor and Love of God (or whatever we name what is ultimate for each of us).

I believe in the spirit of Christmas and the great joy of having my family all together. Well-loved traditions and even the creation of new ones are some of the most important elements of the holiday to me. In my family, we have a slew of traditions that my kids expect, or if they go missing, I hear about. One of those traditions is around Christmas Eve. For years, I’ve made soup for our Christmas Eve dinner, and we’ve shared an early meal, our dining table spread with our good china, all of us dressed in our church clothes, as we prepare to go on to the evening service later on. After church, we like to take a drive in the car, hunting for the best holiday lights, listening to Christmas music from our favorite boy-band N’Sync (for those of you not up on your pop music, this was music popular with young teens in the early ‘90s and is still popular at Christmastime at our house).

This Christmas Eve ritual has been in our family before I even attended seminary, since the time when Natasha was a tiny infant. As we’ve blended families in the last few years, we’ve skipped the soup dinner part of our Christmas, and visited some of my new husband’s relatives. We’ve taken a shorter tour of the lighted houses and headed home to play games. We’ll probably play games again this year, but I’d like to return to our special soup dinner. I miss it, and my kids do too. Sometimes it’s okay to let go of some holiday traditions, and other times, when you let them go, you realize it was a very special part of the celebration.

As much as I love my traditions, I have to make sure I don’t hold on to them too tightly, as we as people and families change over time. In our case, we’ve added Ron to the family, and the kids are getting older. But we’ve become a part of Ron’s family, too, and that has changed our family and its traditions.

For the better. We’ve had to be flexible, but we’ve gained from it. We’ve got our traditions at Starr King Church, too. Certain things we do every year. Or things we’ve done one year that people remember as something we do every year. I love our church traditions just as I do my family ones, but I like to discover new ones, as well. What are your favorite traditions? I’d love to hear about them, and share them with the congregation in the announcement page of the Sunday bulletin. Please email them to me @ uuktk@yahoo.com and I’ll print them in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I wish you happy, happy holidays, and meaningful traditions filled with love.

Love Katie