Christmas and the Rituals of the Family Year

In any family of thoughtful standing, there is a small set of recurring occasions which carry, by long convention, a weight beyond their apparent occasion. Christmas is, in most European traditions, the most senior of these. The principle extends to family birthdays and the anniversary of the founding of the family enterprise. It also includes the summer gathering at the country estate, the annual visit to the family burial ground, and any other date the family has privately agreed to mark. The discipline by which these occasions are kept is, in our view, among the discreet institutions by which a family tells itself who it is.

We are sometimes consulted by principals of the younger generation who wonder whether the older rituals genuinely warrant the considerable preparation they require. Our counsel, given without hesitation, is that the rituals are worth more than is often immediately recognised. A family that lets them lapse, on the unspoken assumption that the modern world has moved on, will make a discovery. Twenty years hence, it will find that the threads by which it had known itself across the generations have been allowed to part.

The staff of the household carry, at this season more than any other, a considerable share of the work by which the family's Christmas is made possible. The well run household acknowledges this in the small thoughtful ways which long tradition has established. There is the early closing of the office on the appropriate days, and the thoughtful Christmas gift which is properly made and properly recorded. There is the meal at which the principal sits down with the staff in the appropriate setting, and the small note in the principal's own hand which thanks each of the senior staff for the year's work. None of these gestures is a sentimental indulgence. Each is part of the thoughtful institution of the household, and each repays the principal many times over in the standing in which the household holds them.

We close with a reflection on the role of rituals in the next generation's experience of the family. The grandchildren who, in time, look back on the Christmases of the family residence will remember, with surprising precision, the small unchanging particulars of those occasions. They will remember the chair the grandfather sat in and the carol the household sang on Christmas Eve. They will recall the small gift the housekeeper produced from the cupboard and the moment after the meal when the principal raised a glass to those who could no longer be present. These are the small institutions by which a family is, across the years, quietly known to itself. The principal who keeps them, with patient and careful attention, has given the next generation an inheritance which no document, however well drawn, can replicate.