After the Thanksgiving holiday my sister-in-law came by to spend time with her brother and our kids. I asked her what she and her family did to celebrate the day. We chatted for a while and she mentioned she’d noticed that their holiday traditions seemed to change every five to ten years. She was resigned to the idea that even the best traditions won’t last. Family members move, or die, or fall out with one another. That’s just how it is, she said. Maybe. Maybe that’s just how traditions are now—short-lived. Or maybe it has something to do with the turmoil I know exists inside her family. I know that’s the reason I revisited the traditions in my own family.

It’s a difficult time of year for those of us with complicated family dynamics. A few years ago, we reworked our family traditions to be more in line with our values and that meant ending a lot of them. I’d love to attend a large gathering at a great aunt’s home and eat a lukewarm dinner in an itchy sweater. I wish I had a gift list so long I could stress about it, but I don’t have those things. I don’t really feel sad about it, it’s just reality. Life didn’t work out that way for me.

I still want to make the holiday season special for my kids. I don’t want the traditions I make with my children to be short-lived, I want them to stand the test of time. I want them to have stories that start with “Every Christmas we would…,” and I think the way to go about it is to focus my efforts on continuing the traditions that feel the most meaningful, rather than the traditions I think we should have.

To keep things manageable, I’ve settled on personally maintaining two traditions. The first, a rather traditional tradition, is decorating Christmas cookies. Every year, we spend a few hours together with icing and sprinkles. It’s a ton of work to prepare, but it’s a fun activity, and it provides a festive addition to the dance teacher’s Dunkin Donuts giftcard. The second, and more unusual, are handmade pajama pants for the whole family. This one evolved organically and has grown in esteem since the kids were small. It started with matching pants in a subtle gingerbread print for the two babies and over time became pants for the whole family plus a kerchief for the dog in a garish print like avocado halves dressed as Santas and snowmen. It’s a weird little tradition but my family loves the pants. They wear them year round. It makes me happy to see them in cozy pants with reindeer heads made to look like planets in a Christmas galaxy in the middle of June. We are a pajama family. The first thing everyone does when they come home is change into pajamas. Pajama pants are inherently meaningful to us. They symbolize comfort and safety and a release of any expectations. They made a good place to create a meaningful tradition. I don’t think it would have taken root had I knitted sweaters.

Our tradition is being tested this year. The people I make pants for are very long-legged and I need a couple bolts of material. When JoAnn Fabrics closed her doors, she locked away the affordable novelty prints I relied on. I looked around online but could find nothing in the price range I was accustomed to (that probably has something to do with what put her out of business) and I had brainstorm other options. I think I’ve figured out a good solution. It’ll be different this year, but what’s important is that I’m keeping the spirit of the tradition alive. I am a bit relieved that I won’t have to iron, cut, and sew five pairs of pants. It’s a lot of work, and I wait too long to start, it becomes another item looming on my holiday to-do list.

Incidentally, if we need 25+ days to prepare for a holiday, that could be a sign that that holiday has grown out of proportion, no? I wonder how people used to prepare? Even one hundred years ago—how much of the time leading up to the day was spent preoccupied with preparations for it? Is it a new phenomenon? I know it’s relatively new to see Christmas decorations next to the Halloween costumes. The Scrooge in me says this happens because we live in a capitalist hellscape, but what if there’s more to it? What if we need to maintain our traditions to help us process the passage of time and as the country becomes less religious, capitalism is picking up the slack?

When I was young my family would visit my grandparents in Pittsburgh a few times a year. My grandfather would make a production of marking my height inside the door frame that led to his study. I remember my name and the date scrawled in all caps above the freshly drawn pencil line. I could compare my height to my cousins’ who visited at different times, but were measured the same way. My grandfather died when I was in high school and the measurement tradition went with him. Years later, when my grandmother was too old to care for the big house herself, I went to help her move and found that the whole house had been repainted for the buyer, including the door frame with its decades of family history. No one had even thought to take a photo. My family didn’t seem as upset as I felt about the loss of the tradition. Their memories of that house were different than mine. To me, it felt like the fresh paint erased years of my life, and it also erased part of him. It makes me tear up now thinking of his consistent effort to record us, the persistent growth of each grandkid, regardless of how often we visited. My grandfather was a man dedicated to marking time.

We mark our children’s heights in the kitchen. I bought a plank of wood and mounted it flush with the door frame in case we ever move.

I think we use traditions to mark the passage of time the same way my grandfather marked it in pencil on the wall. We remember the year the centerpiece caught fire when Grandma knocked over a candle, and we remember the year it snowed and the whole day felt magical. We remember that we have overcome obstacles and that we experienced joy. Each year’s events get folded into the tradition, and our history becomes richer. A tradition is really just a ceremony that commemorates the past—something you do because you have always done it. The scale changes, of course, there are family traditions like our PJ pants, and societal traditions like counting down to midnight on the 31st, but the concept is the same. We can compare this year to last, and we can dream about what next year will bring. Without a tradition to anchor us, we’re comparing apples to oranges.

This year’s pajama pants will be different than past years, but it will add lore to the story of our family. I want to show my kids that our family’s traditions can outlast corporate bankruptcies. This year will be remembered as the year that JoAnn’s closed, and we had to get creative. We persevered. Committing to our traditions year after year reveals to us our own resilience. They show us that we can keep going.