Christmas is a time for tradition, don’t we all know it! But, there are several modern day traditions that we reckon a lot of you have begun to notice, here is a list of the Top Ten Modern Christmas Traditions that we’re sure many of you will experience at least to some degree this Festive period!

Christmas Mobile Phone

Christmas Text Messages

What better way to spread Christmas cheer than with a bulk text? The Christmas text message has only been around as long as mobile phone users started to realise that SMS (does anyone still use “SMS” anymore???) messaging was a quick way to send short messages. Digital drops of happiness.

Round Robin Christmas Letters

Every year, at least one member of our family, or sometimes even a long-lost friend will send out a Round Robin Christmas letter. These letters will generally consist of details of how the nuclear family of the sender has been doing this year. Often, it is the only contact we have had with the person(s) within the letter, but still, every year, its amazing to learn of just how well this persons life has gone, yet again, for the Round Robin Christmas letter is a place to highlight achievement.

Christmas Emails and E-cards

Before the internet was invented, there was no-where for us to Elf Ourselves, and even Christmas cards had to be troublingly and painstakingly placed into actual envelopes and posted. No more! Now we can send out Christmas emails and e-cards, leaving no excuse for not bestowing festive greetings to even the most tenuous of contacts.

This was the first time Television became part of Christmas. Fact.

Christmas TV

Once, there was a time when families would spend all of Christmas doing things like eating, drinking and being merry. Then, in the mid-afternoon, they would all gather round and watch the fire until Grandad fell asleep and everyone else gently drifted off too.

Once a TV was introduced to the living rooms across the western world, Christmas made much more sense. At last, people had something to look at during this period of quiet time when conversation had run dry: that thing is Christmas Television.

Office Christmas Parties

Long ago – in the time of Jesus, Mary and all the characters of the Bible – people didn’t go to work in offices. Nowadays, thankfully, we do, for this means that every year we can gather together for Christmas drinks, and often even a meal too, with the people we spend our working lives with. Office Christmas Parties are great: we get to see the big bosses in their normal clothes, and be ever so slightly offended by those who have over imbibed sufficiently to lose a little too much inhibition. Really great office parties give us enough to talk about while counting down the days until we get to stop working for Christmas proper.

Facebook Christmas

Can you think of a better way to share Christmas cheer than by poking people we used to know at school? The Facebook Christmas is a growing tradition which involves posting links to the most Christmassy things we’ve discovered around the WWW and updating our statuses to display festive cheer. Photos of Christmas antics are a must, and if they involve either yellow snow, drunkenness, or a combination of the two, will also be festooned with hilarious comments too!

Over-the-top Christmas Lights!

Over-The-Top Christmas Decorations

Everyone has a house near them which single-handedly contributes several years worth of Third World carbon credits to the atmosphere by going just a little bit too far with their Christmas decorations, and covering their house with an incredible number of decorative lighting arrangements.

Everyone sneers a little, yet, funnily enough, we’ve all paid a special trip to the house in question “just to see how ridiculous this year’s lights are, of course” but actually, deep down, we all love this Christmas opulence more than a little.

Secret Santa

Secret Santa, or Chris Kringle, is where we put everyone’s names into a hat and only buy one or two presents for the people we pull out, in secret. This is a modern-day tradition designed to get over the huge present buying extravaganza which Christmas might otherwise have become. It often goes hand-in-hand with the office Christmas party or in other circumstances where buying a gift for everyone would just be plain impossible, for example, in a family the size of mine.

Turning on the Christmas Lights

In the long ago forgotten past, before things like electricity, towns and cities would be mean places in November, full of people who didn’t know Christmas was ‘just around the corner’. All of that ended in 1976 when the Lord Mayor of the World, President Gerald Ford, declared that “every town and city worth its salt should light some municipal Christmas lights thus marking the beginning of the joyful journey toward Crimbo (sic)” – since that time, every year, we have had town Christmas lights being switched on around the world by somebody famous.

Christmas Websites

Some people like Christmas so much, that they actually create websites on the internet all about this Christmassy stuff. Just like… Er… This one.

Merry Christmas!