I read once that the main thing that differentiates us humans from animals is our ability, or even need, to connect with our society (I don’t know how they figured this out but I like to think it included some pretty deep discussions with generations of chimpanzees).

Tradition often gets wrongly used in conjunction with nostalgia. But I don’t agree with this, nostalgia is about a yearning for the past. We often hear people hankering over the past, and making comments about how things “weren’t like that in my day”. But when you actually ask them, in reality it was a bit shit, they are just seeing it through the rose-tinted spectacles of the passing of time. Traditions, on the other hand, are dynamic, constantly evolving, changing and incorporating new things. We can even start our own new traditions, such as the Muslim restaurant owner in London who is opening his restaurant on Christmas Day to offer elderly and homeless people free meals ‘no one eats alone’.

Traditions seem more important to us at this time of year, in the UK at least, come November we are bombarded with advertisements telling us that we can have the “Perfect Traditional Christmas” if only we buy one more fancy carton of vacuum-packed brussel sprouts with chestnuts. But, to me, that isn’t tradition. Tradition is allowing yourself to watch Love Actually or Elf for the first time that year, or a festive drink in the local pub with your pals from high school, or granny drinking a bit too much sherry and falling asleep before dessert. One of my favourite things about living abroad and having friends from all over the world is having a chance to learn about their traditions and create new ones together.

Traditions remind us who we are and where we came from but they can also inform where we are going and put us on a path to a better future. They can connect us with our past but they can also be incorporated in the years to come. They can remind us of home when we are far away and missing our loved ones. Once I spent Christmas in South Korea and I cooked a recipe that my gran taught me, that her mother taught her before she left Ireland for Scotland and our family have been cooking ever since. I shared this tradition with my friends and they shared their own Korean/American/South African/Canadian traditions with me. As our lives and families and circumstances get all the more messy, complex and interesting, our new and developing traditions reflect that. So have a wonderful festive period, and relish your traditions even if that is ignoring the whole mass-hysteria and just appreciating a few days off work.