I want to start a tradition in my family. My very own family. One that is unique for us. I need some inspiration here.
Here are the basic requirements:
It must be fun.
It must be family-oriented.
It needs to be relatively affordable.
All suggestions from all walks of life for ALL HOLIDAYS or BIRTHDAYS are welcome!
when living with my parents, the tradition was :
On Christmas morning, we always have croissants and ham.
Lunch is prawns, potato salad, crusty bread rolls and wine at the beach.
Dinner is not an issue… left overs, usually.
When I was in Europe, we had Christmas in the Netherlands, and it just didn’t feel right… it was Christmas and snowing ??? WTF ??? Where’s the sunny beach gone ? 
A tradition I have started with my family (was married in April) is a romp in bed for every occasion. Therefore Christmas should start with as big a smile as both our birthdays have this year 
As far as a tradition for you goes, I’ve always thought that the picnic was underrated, so go for a picnic ! It fits all three criteria.
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Better enjoy those early morning celebratory romps while you can. If you plan to have kids, they have a way of running into the room in those early morning hours to wish you a happy birthday/Christmas!
I love picnicking! Great for the summer time stuff here.
One of the many reasons why I will not have kids !
Another option would be the decorations. As soon as I was old enough, all decorating for holidays was done by the kids. We had some weird ideas on what looked pretty ! This can be a lot of fun…
On my Dad’s side, we dance around the Christmas tree on X-Mas Eve singing songs, some in Danish. Mostly because my Dad’s side is Danish.
On Christmas morning, everyone gets to drink the wine. Cliched as it sounds, it’s a thing from my Irish side. I reason that everyone should get to enjoy Christmas morning, even the kids. Not that you need alcohol, but wine tastes good.
This is a tradition that goes way back to when my brother and I were little kids. Dad used to take my brother and I out on Christmas Eve so that Mom could have time to wrap our presents. We lived in Kalamazoo, MI. Dad would take us to Warren Sporting Goods located in downtown Kalamazoo. My dad’s friend worked there and they would have donuts for the patrons that day. Also dad’s friend would buy us pop from the pop machine. We would spend the morning there, then go to lunch at Coney Island (also located in downtown Kalamazoo) and have coney dogs. I’m now 33 and have kids of my own. Warren Sporting Goods moved out of downtown and my dad’s friend stopped working there years ago, but on Christmas Eve I take the kids and meet my brother and my dad at Coney Island for coney dogs.
It’s my single favorite time of the year.
I am toying iwth the idea of having Thanksgiving at my house. ( Actually, I’m fighting iwth my mom over wanting to have it at my house. I’m going to win, but little does she know my nefarious plans)
I’m thinking of having either chinese or mexican for Thanksgiving. You know, shake up the entire foundation of the holidays.Bring the turkey industry to it’s very knees. My mom will like it. My own family (siblings) will like it) My husband will have a coniption fit.
Every Christmas Eve my mother has a party before we go to church, and before the party, we order take out chinese.
Mr. Jar and I have a cookie decorating party/contest every year. I make about 200 cut out cookies and buy all kinds of decorative stuff, fill pastry bags with different frostings, and we compete for “most beautiful” “most original” and “best use of mystery cookie cutter”
Then, on the first Saturday after New Year’s Eve, we have a Twelfth Night party to signal the end of the Holiday season!
jar
Each December my father and I make about thirty pounds of homemade sausage. 10 pounds using his mother’s recipe, 10 pounds using his recipe, and we’re still determining ‘my’ recipe, so we’ve had a slightly different one each year. This lasts us until Easter, usually.
This year I’m leaning towards a rosemary-basil-thyme mix, solely so I can sing “Oh, do it to me, Rosemary, said Basil, if you’ve got the thyyyyyyyyyyyyme!”
Someday I’ll have a child, and introduce to him or her the pleasures of getting your arms elbow-deep in pork sausage. And then it’s 40 lbs of sausage, and the tradition goes on.
How exciting to have “traditions”…they really can pull families together. It has been my experience though that the really fun “traditions”…the ones that can be “uniquely” yours, will be the ones that just happen.
My mom and my sisters and I, went to the mountains one year on the Friday after Thanksgiving…we had a great weekend which included shopping, a movie, and cutting down our own Christmas trees. We did it again the next year because we had soooo much fun. This year will be like the 8th or 9th year we have taken our little “Thanksgiving get-away”.
It is tradition in our family for mom to make a particular cake (an Irish Potato Cake every Christmas)…
I have heard of families that have “special” plates that the birthday person gets to eat out of…You could go to one of the pottery places and let the kids make the “special” plate for your family…or one for each of your kids so that they can take the plates with them when they start their own family.
My mom also every year…without fail gets each of us girls (and her 2 canine babies) ornaments w/ a place for our pictures. [sub]Maybe I should mention here that I am in my mid 30’s [/sub]
Traditions
Now I have Tevya from Fiddler on the Roof singing in my head…as long as he doesn’t start jumping around singing “If I were a Rich Man”, I’ll be ok.
Have Fun! Let us know what things you go with!
Polly
I have the plain traditions for easter and christmas: Baking, decorations, going to cut the tree, dying eggs, big family dinners that the men fall asleep after…
Our other traditions are different:
Big family dinners: The youngest at the table who knows grace has the job of saying it before dinner.
Halloween: A week or so before, we pack a picnic lunch, go upstate to this farm that has apple picking, pumpkin picking, hay ride, feed the animals, pony rides. I also get to pick up my real jellies for the year that I’m too lazy to make anymore. (currant, raspberry, quice = good. Welch’s grape = bad)
Birthdays: It’s bad luck for the birthday person to see his cake ahead of time. We also have peoples birthday parties at a different time of the year, since our whole family is spread out now. When we get together, then we have the birthday party.
We go camping in Lake George every 4th of July to visit the lady who runs the cabin/campsite, see the fireworks, and go rafting/tubing.
On Halloween, we always have grilled cheese sandwiches before going trick-or-treating.
We have an artificial tree because my mother is allergic to pine trees (I might be too, we don’t know for sure). So we put up our Christmas decorations early. Always there are the same things going on during Christmas decorating:
On Christmas Eve we go to a party at my aunt’s house after church.
On Christmas Day we open our presents under the tree while listening to an old, old tape of christmas carols that we got from Avon years ago. We save our stockings for last. And my grandmothers come over to visit in the afternoon. We always have turkey for Christmas.
We have honeyed ham on Easter.
We have a “birthday crown” and whoever’s celebrating gets/has to wear the crown while we have cake and ice cream.
On your birthday, you get to pick what you want for dinner. We have your favorite food.
At Christmas, our family has a small dinner on Christmas Eve. (Usually soup and sandwiches) Our church service starts at 7:30, so we usually end up getting out of there around 9.
After church, we ride around town, looking at the way people have decorated their houses. A lot of people in Charleston are very creative, and it’s kind of odd to see a 200 year old mansion with crazy Christmas decorations.
After riding around, we go home, and have the Eggnog Toast. Basically, my mom adds a shot of kahlua to everyone’s eggnog, and we toast to Christmas, the holidays, etc. I don’t know why, but we started doing this about 2 or 3 years ago, and we’ve done it ever since.
The only tradition that we have on actual holidays is that my mom cooks a HUGE dinner and my dad does the dishes. (The 3 days out of the year that he ever does them!)
Thanksgiving is my family’s big holiday.
Traditions? We all help out with the making of the meal, generally on the night before. We all sit around the table and cut up bread and celery for the stuffing. Somebody normally complains to my brother for cutting the celery into “much too big honking pieces.” Small cubes of bread are often tossed into people’s faces, followed up by my sister trying to throw a piece of celery into my father’s mouth from across the room (and at least one piece inevitably hits him in the forehead). My sister and I will each grab the smallest potato we can find and try to peel it with the least number of cuts…I’m not sure why we do this, since she wins every time. We always forget the bread. The turkey’s always finished way too early. And we generally lounge in the living room afterwards too full to move.
Well, we don’t have any real traditions, because we’re likely to change things occasionally, just for the hell of it.
Shirley - for Thanksgiving we usually have Spanish Spareribs. This is a recipe that my great-grandmother made for thanksgiving, and even owned a restaurant in North Ft. Worth in the twenties where it was the best-selling dish. It’s enough of a pain to make that you want to save it for really special occasions.
I would tell what we do for Christmas, but it’s so boring it would put you to sleep faster than a turkey dinner.
When I was married, we did presents on Christmas eve, and made love under the Christmas Tree afterwards. This would be tricky with kids. 
Being from a Latin-American family, Christmas is usually a gigantic party with loud music and lots of friends. The holiday usually unfolds as such:
Christmas Eve
9:00 am - usual family wake-up time
12:00 pm - run to the market to buy the food we should have bought days ago.
3:00 pm - start making all the food. This usually includes a ham of some kind, although one Xmas we had lobsters (It was the seafood Xmas).
6-7 pm - food is almost done, people start to arrive. Eggnog is passed around, people start getting drunk.
8 pm - dinner is served. We all sit around a table, turn off the lights, light two candles, and we embarass one of the little kids by having them do a holiday prayer. After this, we turn the lights back on, we chow down on the food, my dad comments on how delicious everything is (he always says that this is the best meal he’s ever eaten), and we stuff ourselves silly.
9 pm - the music starts. And not the Bing Crosby stuff. My dad cranks up the volume on Cumbia, Salsa, Merengue, and other assorted Latin dance music. People start dancing. Beer and eggnog are of course free flowing. This goes on for three hours.
12 am - since it is now officially Xmas, we open up the presents. Someone (usually me) is chosen to pick up a gift and tell everyone else who it is for and who it is from. Since my folks have a large family and circle of friends, this goes on for the next hour or so.
1 am - everyone retires and goes home and to sleep.
Christmas Day
9 am - wake up with a hangover, eat some leftovers, and do nothing for the rest of the day.
And this happens every single Christmas since I was born, so I guess its sort of a tradition.
A few years ago, my parents started a tradition of having smoked salmon sandwiches, potato chips and champagne for lunch on Boxing Day.
December 20 or so I get a phone call from my Mama. My sisters and I are required to show up at her house and make tamales all day. We are assigned our places in the assembly line according to skill. I am a clean freak about the corn husks being silk free, so my first job is to soak those. I take a break, sit in the kitchen sipping coffee and talk to them shredding meat and mixing masa. Then Daddy comes home and we spread the masa and fold the tamales. We make around 12 dozen and Mama steams 3 or 4 dozen to tide us over until Christmas Eve. We all come back over with our families (No outsiders! If you bring a date you damn well better marry him! This will be ** Drachillix’s ** first Christmas Eve with my family) and let the kids take turns in the spotlight. Each opens a gift, youngest to oldest, while everyone watches. Order lasts about 20 minutes, then it’s a free-for-all. Daddy has these godawful electronic musical bells over the mantle and we name-that-tune—those things are 20 years old and still play the same 18 tunes in never-varying order. Daddy buys a bag of batteries, AAA to D cells, so all the games and toys get lit up. We model the clothes and jewelery and drift off home around 10pm. Christmas Day will find my folks in their sweats or at a friend’s party. We have no traditional Christmas morning beyond whatever Santa brought and Daddy always gives the best presents, especially now that we are all grown up.
On Christmas Eve, my family sits together in the living room, we light up the tree, and mom reads out loud from the Norman Rockwell Christmas Book. We’re all atheists or deists, but she always reads the bit about the shepherds and the manger and all that. Then, we get “Christmas Every Day” by William Dean Howells. It’s my favorite short story, and I think every family with a spoiled little girl (not that I was EVER spoiled! ) should read it together. Next, my younger brother gets to pick a story. Then, we get to open one present–a new pair of pajamas. Mom’s family used to do that one when she was small on the premise that you wanted to look nice if Santa peeked in on you during the night, and the tradition stuck.
On Christmas morning, somone pops a batch of cinnamon rolls into the oven as soon as we’re all downstairs. We open presents for a while, and then when the oven timer goes off, we take a break to have hot cinnamon rolls and cold milk and then wade back into the fray.
Well, my mom’s mother is Danish, and we get a lot of our Christmas traditions from her family. We light candles on the tree every Christmas Eve (maybe 50 candles). Really pretty. Also, on Christmas morning we have always had, um, ebil skeevers (ok, definitely not how it’s spelled, but, it’s pronounced “e”-bull, ski-vers). Kind of like little pancake balls. We’ve got this special iron skillet with semi-circular depressions in it, and you basically pour pancake batter into it, (oh yeah, grease the sucker down with butter first) and flip 'em with a fork when they’re appropriately done on one side. When you’re done, you get pancake balls. Great stuff.
Also, for the past 6 years or so we’ve gotten together with two other families who lived in our neighborhood (two of us have moved away now, but we’re doing this anyways) and have a 3 course evening. We’d have hours-douvers (sp?) at one house, dinner at another, and desert and after-dinner drinks at our house. Each family would prepare their part of the meal. A really great oportunity to get together with both friends and family. Since we don’t all live within walking distance anymore we may just do it all at one house this year, which’ll be a change, but fun none the less.