11 Holiday Traditions That Are Making a Comeback: Christmas Pajamas, Homemade Gifts and a Place for Everyone at the Thanksgiving Dinner Table

People
10/10/2026
11 Holiday Traditions That Are Making a Comeback: Christmas Pajamas, Homemade Gifts and a Place for Everyone at the Thanksgiving Dinner Table

Thanksgiving is a few weeks out, and the group-text invitations are losing to paper ones. Families are digging old recipe cards out of kitchen drawers, borrowing sewing machines for matching Christmas pajamas, and mailing handwritten cards to people they would normally ping on their phones. Ordering gifts online feels less festive than taping a name tag to something made at the kitchen table.
Then there’s the chair. More homes now keep one extra seat at the dinner table for a neighbor, a widowed friend or a cousin who just moved to town. Here are 11 holiday stories, from a retired mail carrier writing to his old route to a grandmother who finally said sorry, that show why these traditions are worth bringing back.

  • My paternal grandma told my mom at her wedding that “He’ll leave you within 5 years.” They were married for 31 years until my mama passed.
    Last Thanksgiving she sat across from me and said, “Your mother won, hope it brings peace to her soul.” I got so furious I said, “You don’t get to call it winning. She wasn’t playing against you. She spent 31 years trying to get you to like her.” Grandma Ruth went white and walked out to her car without touching her pie.
    I found her in the driver’s seat 20 minutes later, hands in her lap. “My husband left me in year 5,” she said. “I thought I was warning her. Then your mom just kept staying, and I never knew how to be wrong in front of her.” I didn’t know what to say, so I asked her to come back and at least eat her pie. I have no idea if I will invite her to our family Thanksgiving dinner this year.

“Now I’m a grown-up I’m realising how many of my family’s beach traditions were a cover for having no money.”

When I was little a day at the beach involved taking a flask of tea, and disposable cardboard cups, then using those cups to make sandcastles (wasteful I know, but it was the 90s), making slate pencils to draw on stones, buying the cheapest lemon ice lollies because they were the “only ones” that had the right sticks for making rafts.
Now I’m grown and a parent, I realise that they were all free/super cheap. We had very little growing up, so meeting my cousins at the beach for a day when they were on holiday was a huge treat. I genuinely didn’t notice that I was having a different beach experience than those with floats or body boards. I just thought we had our special family things.
Just goes to show that what kids value is time to play, and it doesn’t need to cost the earth. My son does have a body board and a floatie, but we have also been making slate pencils and he thinks it’s awesome.

  • A few years ago I worked at a job where I had to work on Thanksgiving. I had a shift from 8 am to 11 pm so I only got home around midnight. I was pretty disappointed to be missing time with my family, but I didn’t really have a choice.
    The first year I walked through the door and my family had waited till I got home to start the meal. It became a tradition for a few years to have “Midnight Thanksgiving.”
  • For years I sent one group text on December 1st. “Merry Christmas everyone!” with a tree emoji. Last year my aunt Lorraine, who’s 80, texted back, “I can’t put a text on the fridge.”
    So I bought a box of 30 cards at Target, $9.99, and wrote one for everybody on the old list. My hand cramped around the number 11. “Happy Holidays” looks stupid in cursive, so I had to write something real in each one, like “thank you for teaching me to drive stick” or “I still think about the pierogi.”
    Lorraine’s came back in four days. It said, “Fridge is full.” There’s a pen in my coat pocket now.
  • My family puts an orange in the toe of everyone’s Christmas stocking. It started a few generations ago when an orange was a rare treat to get in December (we live in Canada) and my dad continued it. I have a kid now, and we are going to keep that tradition with our stockings alive, too. I like thinking about how special something can be when we think of it as a mundane thing nowadays.
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  • The holidays were tough for us when we were younger. Mostly because of money, my parents had to work and would come home late at night.
    So me and my brother have a non-spoken tradition of spending the day together eating whatever was at home and concocting weird foods. In the evenings we would all have dinner together around 11pm/midnight. My mom and I would also dance to Enrique Iglesias.
    Now that we’re older and our situation has improved, my brother and I usually send our parents off to do whatever, usually golfing, hiking, etc with their friends, while me and my brother chill at home. And then we all spend the evening together. We never do big dinners, we just like being with each other.
  • My dad always gets me a jar of pickles for Christmas. It started when I was little. He would get himself a jar of pickles and I would always steal a bunch. I’m now 36 years old, and live on the other side of the country (US), and he still sends me a jar of pickles on Christmas.
  • My 15-year-old announced he was going to sew Christmas pajama pants for all nine of us. He has never sewn anything. He watched videos at 1am for two weeks and ate dinner with a measuring tape around his neck. The first pair had one leg shorter than the other. By the 5th, he’d figured out seam allowances.
    My grandfather’s pair is flannel with tiny moose on it, and he wore them to Christmas Eve dinner and every night since, tucked into his boots to shovel the walk. Mine is the first pair, the lopsided one. I wear it on purpose.
  • My mom’s rule is one extra place at the table “for whoever turns up.” Most years it’s just a chair we stack rolls on.
    2 years ago I was at the window around 3pm and saw an old woman walking past in a coat too thin for November. Mom knocked on the glass and pointed at the chair. That was Mrs. Okafor, 81. She’s sat in that seat every Thanksgiving since and brings a sweet potato pie in a dish with her name on masking tape underneath.
    Last year she asked if she could bring her nephew, who’d just moved to town. Mom got up, set two more places, and rearranged the whole table without being asked.
  • My mother stopped sending me recipe links in October. Instead, every Sunday through November, an index card shows up in the mail. One recipe per card, in her handwriting, always with a note in the corner like “Don’t oversalt, you always do.” I’m 38.
    By Thanksgiving I had eight. Card number six has a flour thumbprint on it, right over the word “cranberry.” I left it. When I called to say thanks, she said, “Oh, that’s from 1994.”
    I made the dressing off that card, and I used her mixing bowl, which she mailed in a separate box with a note that said, “Return after New Year’s.”
  • My dad carried mail on the same route for 29 years, and when he retired he kept the list. Every November he buys two sheets of stamps at the post office, sits at the kitchen table with a ballpoint and a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD, and writes a card to every house he used to deliver to. 212 addresses.
    He knows who got a new dog, who has a kid in college now, who put in a ramp last spring. The cards say things like “Saw your tomatoes got big this year.” He’s been doing it since 2019.
    Last week, a man on Alder Street mailed one back, addressed “To Mr. Frank, Retired,” and my dad read it twice standing in the driveway before he came inside. He hasn’t told me what it said. The stamp had a cardinal on it.

Have you ever written or received a handwritten holiday card that you’ve kept? Tell us the story in the comments below.

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