How to Start a New Christmas Tradition Your Family Will Keep for Decades
✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦
Let me tell you about the Christmas traditions in my family that have actually stuck — and the ones that didn't.
The ones that didn't stick: the elaborate coordinated Christmas Eve dinner I attempted exactly once before accepting that takeout pizza is also a form of grace. The advent calendar I bought with great intention on December 1st and forgot to fill past December 8th.
The ones that stuck: reading a Christmas story aloud on Christmas Eve. Letting the kids open one gift the night before — always the same gift, always pajamas for Christmas morning. The oldest hangs the star. The youngest places the baby Jesus in the nativity.
Simple. Repeatable. Carried forward every year without anyone having to remember to plan it.
Here's what I've learned about Christmas traditions that actually last: they don't happen because you planned them perfectly. They happen because they were meaningful enough to be missed when they weren't there.
The Anatomy of a Tradition That Lasts
They're simple enough to repeat exactly. The more moving parts a tradition has, the harder it is to sustain. Simple things can be done every year, in every season of life, by every member of the family.
They have a clear, meaningful anchor. The traditions that outlast the children's childhood tend to be the ones rooted in something bigger than the activity itself.
They create an anticipation that precedes them. You know a tradition has truly taken hold when your kids remind you that it's time. That anticipation is the sign it's become an identity marker: this is who we are at Christmas.
They scale across ages. The very best family Christmas traditions work for a five-year-old and a forty-five-year-old and an eighty-year-old simultaneously.
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Introducing the #MarksGift Tradition
When I was writing MARK! The Herald Angel, I built a tradition into the story itself — not as an afterthought, but as one of the emotional climaxes of the whole narrative.
At the end of Mark's night in Bethlehem, he finds himself standing in the stable with nothing left to give. His pencils are gone. His ledger is adrift. He came to cover a story and has nothing to show for it.
Except one thing: his favorite purple bowtie, swirling with what looked like thousands of galaxies.
He untied it. Smoothed the creases. Found his golden halo — which had only just appeared for the first time that night — and tied the bowtie to the ring. Then he hung it on a small, scruffy evergreen shrub near the manger.
"May this simple gesture bring you comfort on the darkest of nights and warm your heart with purest delight. For you, my King, are most certainly worthy of my crown."
A gold ring. A purple ribbon. Hung on an evergreen. Sound familiar?
The tradition I'm suggesting is simply this: hang a gold ring with a purple ribbon on your Christmas tree. Buy a simple gold ring ornament, tie a bit of purple ribbon through it, and hang it as a reminder of the most lavish act of sacrificial love in the story — a small angel giving the one thing he had left to the King who had already given everything.
Making It Your Own
Read the book first. The ornament without the story is just a pretty decoration. The ornament after the story is a symbol.
Let the youngest child hang it. There's something beautiful about the smallest person doing the most sacred thing.
Say the words. When the ornament goes on the tree, say Mark's words aloud: "For you, my King, are most certainly worthy of my crown." It takes five seconds. It reorients everything.
Share it with someone new. The best traditions spread. Pass the book along to another family and invite them into the tradition.
✦ The Mark's Gift Bundle — book plus gold ring ornament — is available at MarkTheHerald.com.
Download the free Advent devotional and start walking toward Bethlehem this Christmas, three days
at a time.
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