Something Old, Something New

It's a great feeling to have Christmas traditions to anticipate each year. Some families have a growing list of traditional activities, foods, songs, whatever. The family in our study adds new traditions to their longstanding traditions.
Instead of every family member buying a gift for every other family member, a newer method was agreed upon.
Wildly popular in offices across the country, the randomly-chosen Secret Santa single gift purchase concept was recently adapted. It works to decrease the stresses of shopping, parking, affording, etc.


Here's an idea incorporating tradition that came to us recently:Buy an Encyclopedia Set and use a gift card (to the baby store?) as a bookmark for each volume presented as a gift for each birthday, graduation, etc. for a newborn until the child is old enough to have collected the entire set at the age a reference set would be useful for... schoolwork. As time passes, the different stores sponsoring the "gift card bookmark" would be the variable in the equation that made the (predictable) constant of the encyclopedia tradition bearable.