How Christmas Became a Self-Invented Ritual: Reddit Shows the Holiday Is Changing
Christmas is changing, shaped by the people who celebrate it. Across countries, regions, and living conditions, people are adapting the holiday to their own realities. It is no longer a fixed ritual but a collection of warm, meaningful moments that families create and pass on in their own way. In 1,118 Reddit comments, users describe replacing inherited traditions with personalized, emotionally safer, and more flexible customs.
Table of contents
Key Findings
- Modern traditions are small, simple, and home-centered: 42% media rituals, 25% decorating rituals, 19% alternative dinners, 16% cozy/pajama traditions, and smaller clusters of travel, chosen-family gatherings, games, and volunteering.
- People are reinventing Christmas because their lives have changed: 38% mention new family structures, 20% life transitions, 19% anti-consumerism, 18% the search for authenticity, 16% loneliness or distance, and 11% trauma healing.
A Holiday Born in Crisis
Anthropologists have long argued that Christmas has never been a static tradition. In Christmas: An Anthropological Lens, Daniel Miller describes it as a ritual that “reinvents itself with each generation” and continuously absorbs social changes. National Geographic identifies similar trends throughout history, showing that the “classic” images of the holiday — from Victorian dinners to modern-day gift exchanges — are largely recent inventions.
If Christmas has always adapted, then this period of instability was bound to reshape it. To understand how ordinary people are rewriting the holiday today, we turned to the place where these discussions happen most openly: Reddit. We at VisitKyiv.com analyzed 1,118 Reddit comments to understand how people celebrate Christmas today, the traditions they keep or change, and the reasons behind these changes.
In our analyses, we focus on how people celebrate Christmas, which traditions they keep or change, and why. Only comments that explicitly described traditions or reasons for changing them were coded. Some responses expressed multiple themes. The dataset offers a rare, vivid look at the rebuilding of a major cultural tradition from the ground up.
The picture that emerges is clear: Christmas is becoming a self-constructed ritual based more on emotional needs, practical realities, and personal boundaries than on inherited norms.
How People Celebrate Today
Of the comments analyzed, 24% (263 comments in total) were about modern Christmas traditions. These responses indicate a shift from large, obligatory celebrations to smaller, more flexible, and personal ones.
42% — Media Rituals
Movie marathons, revisiting nostalgic favorites, curated playlists, or annual broadcasts are treated as tradition.
25% — Decorating Rituals
Ornament sets, themed trees, family decorating rituals, or Advent calendars marking the start of December.
19% — Alternative Dinners
Food people actually enjoy, instead of the classic Christmas meal — from seafood to Chinese takeout and pizza.
16% — Pajama / Cozy Traditions
Staying home all day, wearing pajamas, and prioritizing comfort and ease.
7% — Gift Alternatives
Limiting presents, choosing handmade items, or opting out of gifts entirely.
7% — Travel / Vacation
Using the holiday to leave town, reduce stress, or reset emotionally.
6% — Outdoor / Nature Activities
Hiking, winter swimming, long walks, or spending time in nature.
5% — Chosen Family Gatherings
Celebrations with friends rather than relatives.
3% — Game Traditions
Board games, puzzles, or annual competitions.
1% — Service / Volunteering
Spending the holidays engaged in charitable work.
One Reddit user (CuriousLands) expressed it directly:
“My family has few to no real Christmas traditions. We all are very religious, but that ended up leading down a path where it was like, all these trappings are man-made and not as important as the religious aspect, and so they can be changed to suit whatever you want.”
Across the dataset, the idea that traditions can be rewritten, reduced, or replaced appeared repeatedly.
Why People Are Reinventing Christmas
Among the 131 comments that clearly stated a reason for changing traditions, six main motivations emerged.
38% — New family structure
Blended families, shared custody, interfaith households, and adult children living independently all require new celebrations that work for everyone.
20% — Changes in life stages
Death, divorce, adult children moving out, and new parenthood often disrupt long-standing plans.
One user described how loss reshaped their family’s Christmas:
“I don’t have many close relatives… When my father-in-law died, we couldn’t imagine spending a traditional Christmas Eve with an empty chair at the table, so I suggested we have a festive buffet instead… Four years ago, my mother-in-law died, and now it’s just me, my husband, and my adult daughter. I always told her that she shouldn’t feel obligated to invite us every Christmas. Her father and I wouldn’t want to be those elderly parents who you feel duty bound to maintain traditions just because that’s how it’s always been done.”
This is a layered expression of grief, boundary-setting, and intentional rethinking.
19% — Anti-consumerism
A rejection of overspending, pressure to buy gifts, and the commercialization of the holidays — a trend highlighted in reporting by The New York Times and The Guardian.
18% — Search for authenticity
A desire to celebrate in ways that feel emotionally genuine rather than obligatory, consistent with The Atlantic’s coverage of alternative and secular December rituals.
16% — Loneliness or distance
Migration, separation from family, long-distance relationships, and relocation often mean celebrating alone — a trend widely reported by the NYT in stories about holiday loneliness.
11% — Trauma healing
People prioritizing emotional safety over tradition: declining invitations, avoiding difficult environments, or celebrating with chosen family instead.
Taken together, these motivations indicate a movement away from tradition as inheritance and toward tradition as choice.
Weird traditions, according to Reddit users
In addition to the best-known traditions, Reddit users also highlighted a number of customs that they themselves described as “strange,” “unusual,” or simply local. These examples show how Christmas traditions have always varied according to the customs of different countries and, for the most part, are more diverse than commonly known festive traditions suggest.
Many comments also talk about regional practices, such as:
- Mari Lwyd (Wales): a decorated horse’s skull carried from house to house in a singing and greeting contest to bring good luааck.
- House-to-House Vertep Play (Ukraine): performers go from home to home staging a small folk play called vertep. They bless each household and bring good wishes. Usually wear costumes.
- Carp (Poland/Czech Republic): buying a live carp before Christmas and keeping it in the bathtub until it is ready to be eaten.
- Throwing Kutia at the Ceiling (Ukraine): a Christmas Eve ritual where a spoonful of kutia (a ceremonial wheat dish) is tossed upward to see how many grains stick. The more that remains on the ceiling, the better the family’s fortune in the coming year. It’s an outdated tradition that is now done for fun.
- Krampus and Perchten (Austria/Germany/Slovenia): winter parades with costumed figures meant to scare away evil spirits.
- Mummering (Newfoundland, Canada): visiting neighbors in disguise, with noise and comical performances.
- Caga Tió (Catalonia): children “feed” a log for several days and then beat it with a stick so that it will “give” them gifts.
- KFC Christmas (Japan): families bring fried chicken home on Christmas Eve after it became a national tradition.
Reddit users also shared traditions invented by their families and communities. Some of them are deliberately absurd or humorous, others forged by circumstance and resilience:
- The annual “decapitation of the butter turkey” ceremony
- The annual search for a testicle diagram hidden somewhere in the house before Christmas
- Metro-Shelter Christmas: Christmas caroling and vertep performances held in metro stations, where platforms double as bomb shelters and become improvised stages during air-raid alerts. This video shows St. Nicholas Day in Kyiv, Ukraine, which is celebrated in the metro that serves both as a shelter and as a place for holiday traditions.
- The nacho table, where the entire table is covered in foil and turned into a giant sheet of melted cheese and chips
- A long-running game called “hide the baby Jesus,” with strict rules about where the figurine can be placed.
- Generator Christmas means celebrating the holiday during power outages, with families singing carols by candlelight.
- Meat Day, December 28, is celebrated with lots of meat and pickled vegetables ordered from the butcher
- Dog ornaments, bought at a flea market each year, reworked and given to all family members
These traditions may seem unusual to outsiders, but Reddit users described them as expressions of identity, humor, and family culture, proving once again that Christmas has always been more flexible and personalized than it is commonly described.
A Holiday People Are Rewriting in Real Time
Reddit’s role in this transformation is significant. It serves as a public archive of how people renegotiate culture under pressure. Alongside academic and journalistic reporting, conversations on the platform reveal that Christmas is increasingly shaped by emotional reality rather than cultural expectation.
In the comments, people emphasized:
- autonomy over obligation
- comforting rituals over performative ones
- small gatherings over large, stressful ones
- financial realism over consumer pressure
- emotional safety over tradition for tradition’s sake
Christmas is decentralizing into a set of micro-rituals created by individuals and small families rather than dictated by long-standing norms.
Christmas is becoming a celebration that people construct for themselves. Our analysis proves that the holiday is not being abandoned, it is being adapted.
In this era of conflict, division, and personal recalibration, Christmas is emerging as a modular celebration: something people assemble to fit their emotional and practical needs.
People no longer ask: “How should we celebrate Christmas?” Instead, they ask: “Which traditions make sense for us this year?”
Christmas has reinvented itself many times before. This is simply the newest version, which is shaped by people living through profound change.
However you celebrate Christmas, with strange traditions, simply gathering at home with your family, or bringing back old traditions, the VisitKyiv.com team wishes you a merry holiday season and a happy Christmas!
Methodology
This analysis is based on 1,118 comments collected from 30 Reddit communities discussing Christmas traditions. Subreddits included:
r/Christmas, r/ChristmasDecorating, r/Holidays, r/AllTheQuestions, r/BitchesWithTaste, r/AskReddit, r/AskTheWorld, r/AskEurope, r/AskUK, r/AskIreland, r/AskPH, r/AskAnAustralian, r/AskConservatives, r/AskWomenOver60, r/NewParents, r/Mommit, r/Toddlers, r/Teenagers, r/ProgressiveMoms, and others.
Only comments that explicitly described:
- traditions people practice, or
- reasons for changing those traditions were coded
- 263 comments explicitly described traditions (base = 100%
- 131 comments explicitly stated a reason for reinventing traditions (base = 100%).
Comments expressing multiple themes were coded across several categories.
