Decorating Your Christmas Tree

Everyone has a holiday tradition. For some people, it is baking cookies. For other people, it is carolling. For others, it is putting up lights outside. And for some others, it is getting drunk on eggnog and playing board games.

The list of traditions can go on and on. They can be as unique as your family is. There is no right or wrong type of holiday tradition. If you play darts and drink whiskey on Christmas Eve while watching Die Hard, that's a great tradition. If you read the same book every Christmas Eve, good for you. If you do nothing, well that's also kind of a tradition.

How you handle the holidays is completely up to you, but having traditions makes them fun and special to us. Traditions are something that we pass on to the next generation. We take our traditions with us when we merge families, when we create new traditions.

This is how we end up with traditions that are hundreds of years old and ones that just started last holiday. It's a lovely process. It's a great way to grow and change. And it's a great way to pay tribute to your family heritage.

For me, decorating the Christmas tree has always been my favourite family tradition. When I was little this used to involve actually going out and picking a tree from the yard to cut down for our Christmas tree. We'd then drag it into the house (getting pine needles everywhere) and put it up in its tree stand.

We had so many decorations for it. I remember the stringy tinsel that we had to stop using because the cat liked to eat it. I remember our wooden and cloth decorations that we put down low on the tree for the cat to play with. I remember how certain decorations had stories behind them and it was always fun to know where they came from. And of course, there were the decorations that we'd made as kids that went on the tree every year. And all of the candy canes.

We switched to a fake tree later in my life after my mother passed away and the decorating process became more about the tree looking "pretty" and less about the meaning of what went on the tree. Ornaments had to be spaced out a certain way. Certain colours couldn't go next to each other. The ornaments that I loved from my childhood had no place on this new tree. The handcrafted ornaments got left in a box. The wooden ornaments never even got considered. The cloth ornaments were discarded.

My step-mother's tree needed to look a certain way. It needed to have her ornaments on it, and there was some room for some of our nicer ornaments, of course. In the end, we found a 70/30 split when it came to what went on the tree. The most devastating loss to me was not being able to put our angel on top. That had always been my favourite part. But our angel had no place on the "pretty" tree.

Now I have my own tree to decorate. It has taken a few years to get to this stage but last year I finally bought a Christmas tree and we all decorated it. It was a prelit, seven and a half foot tree that I picked up at a discount price. I got the cheapest bulk container of ornaments I could find at Walmart for it and a star to go on top. A family friend gave me some of her decorations to add in as well. And each household member picked a Disney character to put on the tree.

Everyone pitched in to decorate it. Everyone had a say in what went on it. And we kept it up for the whole month of December. And this week I'll be putting it up again, hopefully with the help of everyone else.

Decorating the tree is still my favourite tradition, whether I do it on my own or have everyone with me to help. I like to put on music or a Christmas movie. I like to eat cookies and drink hot chocolate while we work. I like to make a whole experience of it.

Traditions are what we make them. You can let one bad experience in your life ruin a family tradition for you, or you can recapture it as your own. I love my tradition too much to let it fall to the wayside and I'm sure it will change more as I move forward in life.

Building your family traditions is important. And you can build those traditions with friends or neighbours. "Family" is what you make of it. Most of all, enjoy your holiday. Decorate your tree, if you have one, and remember that it's the little moments in life that count.