Joy Happened Somewhere

It’s the least wonderful time of the year: taking down the Christmas tree.

If it were up to me, it would stay until Valentine’s Day. Honestly, I’d probably leave it up until next Christmas. But the twinkling lights are no longer welcome here in Japan, and my husband eventually intervenes with logic and a need to update the storage configuration. So this week, we packed away our massive fake tree and stuffed its pieces back into its soft-cornered box, covered in a half-dozen PCS shipping stickers, each one a record of a former life it got to see.

As I wrapped ornaments in old tissue paper, I found myself thinking about the season we were closing out. Despite a bit of medical friction in our lives right now, Christmas was absolutely delightful. A new place, new rhythms, new surprises. While packing, I reminisced on a me from years ago who was determined that our kids would collect a special ornament every year. One per person, every year, faithfully, forever. I think it happened maybe twice for some kids, four-ish times for others. Some I don’t even remember buying, and neither do they.

What I really wanted to be our thing fizzled into ragged remnants, but the failure may have actually spared me. If I do the math - four kids, eighteen years minimum - that plan would have left me with at least seventy-two haphazard ornaments by the time they all left home! That’s not tradition, that’s a lifetime of inventory.

Skirting that outcome has made me more aware of how differently other people hold tradition too. I find that most people talk about traditions at Christmastime with a kind of reverence that I recognize, but don't always comprehend. Foods that appear once a year, and rituals repeated so often they become inherited rather than chosen.

This year, I saw a friend post, “I can’t remember a Christmas without this,” referring to a cheese roll. The devotion behind it was so genuine that it had me as happy to see the picture as she was to present it. What struck me, however, was that I wasn’t quite sure if I felt an absence in myself from not having something like that. Admirably, from the outside, those traditions look like stability. Something that stays, that you can return to without thinking.

In contrast, my family is often not even in our own home for Christmas, or in a home at all. My dad was in the Army, and my husband still serves. Between them, I’ve lived in four countries: the United States, the Marshall Islands, Japan, Germany twice. Hawaii twice as well, which is not a country, but is distinct enough to count. As a result, I don’t really have a home in the traditional sense. Over the years, we’ve spent Christmas in borrowed houses, temporary apartments, hotels ... once in a hospital, and once on a plane crossing the international date line. Christmas has happened mid-move, mid-deployment, mid-figure-it-out. When I think of Christmas with my family, there really is no repeatable backdrop – but that’s far from insinuating gloom.

My memories from childhood holidays live in the brilliant colors of the 1980s. Too much food, extra tables dragged in, the magic of Santa and the sense that something was always happening. My mom is endlessly creative, both in art and in the way she arranged our lives, so nothing could be dull. Christmas felt ... handmade. In hindsight, I can see how intentional that was, especially the invitation for us to work with what surprises presented themselves. But it was also a life in motion, and because of that, I didn’t carry forward traditions framed as non-negotiable. (Except for the long-distance Christmas phone call to grandparents, my kids continue that, thankfully fortified by WiFi.)

I’ve watched traditions work beautifully for other people, and even participated in many eclectic versions. They offer structure and belonging. But anything that I tried later to resurrect, or assign permanence to, ended up feeling obligatory. Or I realized I was the only one trying to maintain a dream that no one else had asked for. Over time, I think I hardened a little after getting excited about ideas I couldn’t sustain.

That said, I’m not averse to tradition at all. There are things I return to when circumstances allow. If we’re in a home (with an oven) for Thanksgiving, I cook a turkey. Every time. Not because it’s sacred, exactly, but because it fits, because I know how, and because it marks the day in a way that feels right. This year in Japan, our “oven” could only fit a turkey breast, so we pivoted. My husband declared it so delicious that we should only ever have breasts on Thanksgiving from now on. So a new tradition may well have been formed. (Or he was making an inappropriate joke, I’m never sure with him.)

Sometimes traditions we’ve adopted have fit a season, then quietly fall away. For a while, we beach camped and barbecued for New Year's Eve. It worked beautifully ... until we moved somewhere too cold to be outside in January. That pattern of starting and stopping has molded the way I understand continuity. For me, it isn't about what stays, but what travels.

Every move/transition brings the same specific question: What are you bringing with you this time? Not just physically, but emotionally. What matters enough to survive the crossing? Ironically, I pack more Christmas decor than clothes. Most of it isn’t even sentimental, they’re largely thrift store and craft fair finds. Things gathered along the way that appeal to me as evidence that joy happened somewhere, and can and will again.

We’ve also had the same Elf on the Shelf for…ever. My mom mailed it to us one Christmas, before our youngest was even born. When our oldest learned the truth, we invited him into the responsibility of keeping the magic alive for the younger ones. Each child joined when their time came. What’s funny is that even once they “knew,” they still expected the elf to move every night. Apparently, once you start a tradition you agree to hold at least partial responsibility for it forever. The repetition held its shape so well that it almost circled back into belief. At this point, the youngest is the last left to believe, and the older ones take turns moving it. For them, getting to move the elf has become the tradition now.

Here in Japan, we learned that Christmas tradition looks very different from what we expected. The thing everyone does - the thing you’re supposed to do - is eat KFC. That’s right. Kentucky Fried Chicken. On Christmas. My kids were thrilled. Out of everything Japan has to offer, this was what they wanted most. So we ordered it, brought it home, and sat around the table with grease-spotted boxes and pure, uncomplicated joy.

It struck me that because we aren’t tethered to a single version of Christmas, nothing was lost. No one felt like they were giving something up, and we weren’t squeezing this in around expectations. We were simply participating in a tradition that exists here, knowing it wouldn’t follow us, and going all in anyway.

It reminded me of Nikolaustag in Germany when I was a kid, where we left our shoes outside for St. Nicholas to leave small gifts that affirmed we had been good. A beautiful magic that existed fully on its own terms. It did not compete with anything else, and it stayed where it belonged when we left. One of my favorite childhood memories.

I suspect my sense of where roots are supposed to be is shaped, in part, by American culture - the one I bring to the table anywhere I end up in the world. My nation's story is so young, still forming and still mobile. So, maybe I didn’t miss the inception of tradition so much as I grew up under something unfinished. In that context, however, through the readjustment of different lenses, I'm grateful that my faith provides steadiness that no cultural landscape ever could.

We value the space that Christmas creates for us to return to the story of Jesus’ birth. I don't fold that into my curiosity about traditions, because Christ's birth is not merely symbolic to me - it's foundational. No matter where we are, that story doesn’t shift with geography or custom. I love the way Christmas is celebrated in the Christian Church, and I also love good old-fashioned secular American Christmas. The lights, the music, the shared shorthand of the season. I don’t experience that as dilution or distraction, and holding both has never felt contradictory to me. It's honest, and it should be a reflection of the way faith actually lives in my daily life.

At the center of all this thinking is being in the constant act of deciding what makes it into the boxes. We don’t get the option to preserve every tradition, so we practice when they fit. We keep Christ the foundation, and we keep the basics for structural support - the things that still work even when everything else changes. Because change is our only real constant.

One thing I’ve learned lately (and this has also prompted me to purposefully take fewer pictures as we explore Japan) is that meaningful things do not need to be preserved to be real. Some things are real because they were fully lived, and then allowed to rest.

So after all of this overthinking, we slid the Christmas tree box back into storage, turned off the lights, and that was it. I felt finished with the season in a way that I hadn’t expected. Not because it stayed the same, but because it didn’t need to. It happened, we were there for it, and now it gets to rest.

Christmas 2025 in Japan with ¾ of our kids, a threadbare elf, and KFC is complete.