Inventing new blended family holiday traditions
One of the best things we ever did in our blended family was to invent new holiday traditions. This was something we figured out years in, the hard way, and mostly by accident — just like everything else. Only by letting go of our ideas of how we thought the holidays “should” be celebrated (or when!) were we able to finally find meaningful ways to enjoy the season.
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Why are traditions important for blended families?
Traditions help bring meaning to our families, blended or otherwise — not just during our times of celebration, but also in our daily lives. And traditions don't have to have been passed down through generations of ancestors to feel meaningful, either. Even the simple practice of always stopping for pizza on the way home from soccer practice establishes a tradition: a consistent togetherness behavior we can count on.
When so much about stepfamily life can feel unfamiliar, unsure, and uncertain, creating any kind of routine gives all of us an anchor we can tie our sanity to — stepparent and stepkid alike. This is especially true at holidays, when the way we all used to respectively celebrate is now suddenly no longer an option.
Whether because of custody schedules or extended family considerations or any one of a million other reasons, the holiday traditions we grew up with sometimes just don’t fit with our new stepfamily. The loss of these basic touchstones that define “normal” and “family” to us can leave us feeling displaced, which is one of the major contributing factors to wondering why our blended family doesn’t quite feel like an actual family.
Creating new traditions gives us something that’s all ours and only ours, weaving together a bond we can share as a family unit.
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Navigating stepfamily challenges at the holidays
Holidays in a stepfamily can get intense, which is hardly any surprise considering how complicated regular ol’ daily life already is in a blended family. Holiday season seems to make everyone a bit more frazzled than usual, kicking any existing tension between households up even further.
There are some things you can do to reduce conflict between co-parents at the holidays, but really reducing conflict is only part of the challenge. There’s still the question of how to introduce positive elements at your holiday celebrations — finding some way to honor family and togetherness without feeling like every Christmas ornament represents some emotional landmine from a history you weren’t even around for.
What stepparent wouldn’t feel left out if the only ornaments decorating the tree are those that your partner and their ex bought together with their kids? Or what if you always make a certain kind of Christmas cookie in your family at the holidays, but cookie-making is something your stepkids strictly do at their other parent’s home?
It’s really hard to let go of what you imagined your holiday family traditions would look like to make room for new ones. And it’s okay to grieve the loss of that envisioned future, even as you commit to find different ways to celebrate instead.
Where do stepparents fit in at the holidays?
Stepparents tend to join their new stepfamily in the same way that we’d slip into a dark theatre when the movie’s half-over: Sorry for interrupting! We didn’t mean to bug anybody. We buy into the inaccurate belief that it’s our job to fit in with the existing family, oftentimes going to ridiculous lengths to maintain a status quo we never helped create.
The reality is that when two people start dating and one (or both) of them has kids, a new story begins. A new family launches. And the only way to make room for that new family is to change up the way things have always been done.
Not to say that all previously existing holiday traditions should be nuked from orbit and never spoken of again, but rather that at the holidays — just like at every other time of year — all members of a blended family have to compromise to make room for the new stepfamily that you’re becoming. Our partners need to make space for stepparents to contribute some traditions of our own, and encourage our stepkids to make some space too.
As a stepparent, you’ll probably also have to tolerate some holiday traditions that aren’t your fave. Like hearing all about “Well MOM always does blah blah blah for Christmas” or “But my DAD never blah blah!” (I’m pretty sure these must be the ‘scary ghost stories of Christmases long long ago’ mentioned in that one Christmas song.)
There’s no easy way to get through this, except by reminding yourself that blending a family is a process. As you solidify your own new stepfam holiday traditions, slowly the stories of the family-that-was will get replaced with stories from within your own stepfamily. You’ll create your own memories. New memories. And the only way to do this is to first live through the messy-mixed-feelings days that eventually become those memories.
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Creating new blended family holiday traditions
As a kid, my family’s Christmas consisted of a solid 48 to 72 hour non-stop eating and present-opening extravaganza. Festivities began at 4pm sharp on Christmas Eve with the opening of a single present, and included singing around the tree holding hands. (Yes, like the Whos down in Whoville.)
To say traditions were important in my family at Christmas would be an understatement. Christmas was sacred: inviolable and larger than life, packed with family and food and twinkly lights and laughter.
Never once in my life did I think I wouldn’t celebrate in the same way with my own kids. Yet my husband Dan & I were never able to count on enough consistent time with SD and BD both together to figure out how Christmas or Thanksgiving should work. SD spent Christmas with her mom every year and Thanksgiving with her dad, while BD had the opposite schedule. The annual uncertainty of when or how (or if) we’d manage to celebrate seemed to be our only constant.
Considering that nothing else in our life as a stepfamily was settled or peaceful, you’d think the predictably unpredictable holiday schedule would end up as just one more hiccup I learned how to roll with. Instead, I found that while I could live with a certain amount of chaos during the rest of the year, squeezing Thanksgiving and Christmas in like afterthoughts was just too demoralizing. It’s not bad enough that we already only see each other part-time, but we can’t even eat turkey together once a year for Pete’s sake?? Come on.
Eventually the solution we found was to make up arbitrary holidays on non-holiday dates. We weren’t even trying to be clever; we were exhausted and defeated — our invented holidays were a last act of desperation we hoped would be worth the tradeoff for gaining peace of mind. Maybe finding some much-needed solid ground upon which we could build something new.
Not that the decision was easy. I’d be lying if I said that celebrating completely made-up holiday traditions on random days of the year felt like the real deal. They absolutely did not. They felt like Fakesgiving and Jolly Old Fake Nick.
But only at first.
In the years since then, our invented celebrations have deepened, grown richer, and become more established. Our Thankful French Onion Soup Day feels just as thankful as calendar Thanksgiving. Our Paper Tree Christmas feels as crammed with holiday cheer as Christmas on December 25th ever did.
I’ve even come to love how we’ve turned such hallowed holidays completely inside out. Which is really the microcosm version of how blended family dynamics themselves turn traditional family dynamics inside out.
We have these ideas of how we’re “supposed” to celebrate the holidays, just like we have these ideas of how we’re "supposed" to blend a family. And yet our made-up holiday traditions ended up forming the foundation of our blended family. It’s pure karmic irony that those new traditions arose directly in response to the very elements that kept us from celebrating in a traditional way.
Finding joy in non-traditional blended family traditions
With every passing year, our new traditions become more legit to our kids. Maybe they’ll even pass our made-up holidays on to their own kids — and wouldn’t that be the craziest full circle in all of this: that something we invented out of thin air because we had to ends up being passed on as sacred.
But really, why not? Why shouldn’t our made-up holidays be just as important and valid and worth celebrating as traditional holidays? Our blended family’s traditions are just as much about family and togetherness as any traditional family’s — I’d argue even more so, when we’ve had to fight for that togetherness in a way that a traditional family can never understand.
Traditional families don’t experience the limitations that drive stepfamilies to invent new traditions, find absurdly creative ways to celebrate birthdays and holidays. And yet, our time together feels all the more celebratory precisely because it’s so hard-won.
There are a zillion movies about the true spirit of Christmas and I cry at every one of them. But nothing has taught me this lesson so well as living in a blended family: that Christmas is where you find it. Or, in our case, where and when we invented it. That the date itself is only an accessory, and our traditions are what matter. That sometimes, and especially in a blended family, those made-up traditions can become the most sacred of all.
