Ah, tradition.

We don’t have many holiday traditions as a family.

Matching Christmas pajamas never occurred to me until last year.

DH is horrified at the idea of opening any gifts on Christmas Eve, even the aforementioned pajamas, so that never happens

The baking of holiday cookies is random & may happen in October due to time constraints.

Santa has no special wrapping paper.

Until this year the tree was 3ft high. While we do make a big deal out of decorating it, it made a tiny impact on the overall holiday appearance and feel of the house.

We took the kids to see Santa once 5 years ago. It was more than an hour wait and they freaked out when we were about three people away from our turn. They never expressed a wish to see him since.

Normally we do a Lego Advent calendar but I left it too late this year and they are sold out everywhere & I’m not paying $60 for one on eBay. I have no objection to getting one as late as the 10th though so I am still looking.

We do drive around looking at the lights at least once in December.

Part of the problem is that every other year we are in Florida at Xmas & so I spend much of December packing & shipping & planning for the trip.

Traditions must be portable.

We started a new one this year.

This the elf Elvin (gosh I am so clever with names aren’t I?) who is visiting us for the month of December. Elvin is Santa’s narc, his stooge, his spy. Elvin rats the boys out to Santa nightly. Um…I mean… Elvin is here to help the boys to remember to be good. He lets Santa know how well they are doing every night and if they have been doing very good for awhile Santa might let him bring the boys a surprise one morning. He reappears every morning in different places & they have to find him.

Havoc was so cute about it this morning. I left Elvin on my desk with the letter & assumed the boys would see it right away when they got up but apparently they missed him initially & Havoc told me Elvin suddenly appeared on the desk where he hadn’t been before! He was so excited by it. He came running in our room and read some of the letter to us, left, talked about it with Mayhem, came back in, read some more to us, went back out, talked more with Mayhem (who was more interested in getting in as much Wii Batman time as possible before we got up and made him get ready for school) and then came back in our room and summarized the letter for us.

It was a matter of some discussion that Elvin was sewn together. He eventually decided that Santa makes his own elves & cloth ones are better workers. He is looking forward to finding Elvin every morning. Probably his enthusiasm will get Mayhem’s going but I could see Mayhem eyeing the elf suspiciously. But Mayhem’s default reaction to anything his parents ask him to do is “NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO” so I can understand his hesitation about it.

I probably have one more year, if that, of Santa being real. Havoc believes, but it’s an almost desperate belief, like he knows the truth but isn’t willing to let it go yet. Mayhem has always been willing to go along with it but has no strong affinity for the Santa myth. We never made that big of a deal out of Santa so that is not too surprising.

Next year I’ll order that Advent calendar in October.