My self-created Christmas tradition is to refuse to go anywhere at all on Christmas Day, though this has less to do with tradition than with being the child of parents with an unhealthy penchant for divorce.
When you've spent your childhood Christmases being transported from one parental home to the other, always aware that one parent is feeling left out, (or trying to pump you for information about the other one), you go off the whole thing a bit. Especially when the children of the new marriages get to stay home all day and play with their presents, while you spend the day like a hypertensive UN diplomat shuttling between increasingly tense and hazardous locations.
So, when you have children of your own, and find yourself subjecting them to the same process of driving around between various grandparents' and ex-step-grand-parents' houses, for the whole of Christmas Day, you begin to feel that enough may be enough.
That this was indeed the case was confirmed when, on one memorable occasion, we managed to miss dinner at all of the three "parental" homes we visited on that particular Christmas Day, arriving either too early or too late to eat at any of them.
We finally got home at 11.00pm, starving hungry, stone cold sober, and with two very, very irritable small children, who had somehow managed to lose half of their gifts somewhere en route. At that point, we vowed never, ever to do it again. And we haven't, either - not for the last twenty years, or so.
Boxing Day is still a free-for-all, though. That's next on the hit list.
When you've spent your childhood Christmases being transported from one parental home to the other, always aware that one parent is feeling left out, (or trying to pump you for information about the other one), you go off the whole thing a bit. Especially when the children of the new marriages get to stay home all day and play with their presents, while you spend the day like a hypertensive UN diplomat shuttling between increasingly tense and hazardous locations.
So, when you have children of your own, and find yourself subjecting them to the same process of driving around between various grandparents' and ex-step-grand-parents' houses, for the whole of Christmas Day, you begin to feel that enough may be enough.
That this was indeed the case was confirmed when, on one memorable occasion, we managed to miss dinner at all of the three "parental" homes we visited on that particular Christmas Day, arriving either too early or too late to eat at any of them.
We finally got home at 11.00pm, starving hungry, stone cold sober, and with two very, very irritable small children, who had somehow managed to lose half of their gifts somewhere en route. At that point, we vowed never, ever to do it again. And we haven't, either - not for the last twenty years, or so.
Boxing Day is still a free-for-all, though. That's next on the hit list.
