“We didn't have a Christmas tradition. So we made one.”

July 18, 2026 By Carol Noman

I used to think traditions were something a family either had or didn't have.

 

Growing up, mine didn't. We had a tree, and we had things we bought to put on the tree. Every December we drove to the store, picked whatever was on the shelf that year, hung it up, and that was Christmas. Nothing on that tree came from us. You could have taken the whole thing down and rebuilt it out of a stranger's boxes and no one in the house would have noticed.

 

I didn't want that for my kids. I just had no idea what to put in its place.

 

What we tried first

We have board games. We have card games. We have a drawer of art supplies I bought with real optimism. The kids barely touch any of it.

 

Two Decembers ago I found a project online that promised a magical afternoon. It involved paint, an oven, and drying overnight. By the second hour, one kid had drifted off to the TV, the other was crying because hers had cracked, and I was scraping something off the table with a butter knife. We threw them out in January. Nobody brought it up again.

 

That's the part nobody warns you about. Anything that needs three straight hours of everyone being in a good mood isn't a tradition. It's a bet you're going to lose most years.

Then I changed what I was looking for

I stopped looking for an activity. I started looking for a tradition.

 

They're not the same thing. An activity fills an afternoon. A tradition is the same afternoon, on the same weekend, every single year, until the kids start asking about it in October.

 

Which meant my requirements were completely different from what I'd assumed. It didn't need to be impressive. It needed to be repeatable, and it needed to work the first time — every time — because something that fails once doesn't get a second year.

The day after Thanksgiving

That's when we do it now. Not a date I picked; it just turned out to be the only day everyone was already home, already fed, and not going anywhere.

 

Newspaper down over the table. Music on. Everyone still full from the day before.

 

The gel goes into the mold. Water on top. And the shape forms right there, in front of them, in about a minute — no oven, no overnight, no "let's see how it looks tomorrow." My youngest was six the first year and did every step herself, start to finish.

 

That last part matters more than it sounds like it should. There are no tears on a Sunday in November, because nothing collapses, nothing cracks, and nothing has to be started over.

Then it goes in the globe

You screw the top on and turn it over.

 

My six-year-old shook hers, watched it settle, shook it again, and then carried it around the house for the rest of the afternoon showing it to people who had already seen it. She made three more that day. She hung them herself, and she was extremely particular about where.

 

I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds. It's not that the thing she made was beautiful. It genuinely wasn't. It's that she made it, and it was on our tree, and that had never happened in my house — not once, in my entire childhood.

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The part I didn't plan

Halfway through that first afternoon she asked if she could make one for her grandmother.

 

She made it. She wrapped it herself, which is to say she used most of a roll of tape. She handed it over on Christmas Day and stood there watching my mother-in-law's face — and my mother-in-law, who is not remotely a sentimental woman, hung it in her kitchen window. It is still there.

 

The next year she made one for her teacher. Then one for the neighbor who feeds our cat. She keeps a list now. She decides who's on it, and she does not consult me.

 

That's the piece I would never have thought of, and it's the reason this thing is now in its fourth year. A kid-made gift is different from a bought one. Everyone who receives one understands exactly how much of a six-year-old's afternoon it cost, and they behave accordingly.

The honest part

They last the season.

 

In January we take them off the tree, put them away, and next November we make new ones. That's not a flaw. That's the whole point. If they lasted forever we'd only do this once, and then it wouldn't be a tradition — it'd be a Saturday we had in 2023.

 

This year's are already on the tree. Next year's don't exist yet. That's what makes the day after Thanksgiving worth waiting for.

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