My dad has 156 first cousins. On his dad's side alone. So when I say I grew up with a big extended family, I mean it literally.
But the traditions that actually shaped me were never about the size of the crowd. They were about a small handful of things we did the exact same way, every single year, without fail.
Christmas Eve dinner. Then the piano, hymns and secular songs both, always ending with "Silent Night." Then Luke chapter two, read out loud by the tree. Then presents, opened one at a time, so everyone gets to watch everyone else open theirs. Then a game. Then socks laid out with our names on them, even as adults, even now, waiting to be filled by morning.
And birthdays. Every single person in my immediate family calls the birthday person and sings the moment they pick up the phone. My sister is the only one who can actually carry a tune. It happens anyway, every year, no exceptions. It took me almost twenty years to remember my brother in law's birthday is August 19th, not the 18th. He gently corrected me nearly every time. I still called.
Here's what I didn't fully understand until I researched this chapter: none of that repetition was incidental. It was doing something measurable.
The difference between a routine and a ritual
There's a distinction in family psychology research that most of us never consciously think about. A routine is something you do because it's efficient. A ritual is something you do because it carries meaning, even when it's objectively the slower, more inconvenient way to get through an evening.
Psychologist Barbara Fiese at Syracuse University led a review spanning fifty years of research across 32 separate studies. Her team found that family rituals, specifically, were consistently linked to stronger marital satisfaction, better parenting outcomes, and healthier child adjustment. Reading the Christmas story out of Luke every year isn't required to celebrate the holiday. It's not efficient. That's precisely why it works. It's the part of the evening that makes it feel like your family's Christmas, not a generic holiday that happens to land on the calendar.
Why shared rituals create more joy than doing the same thing alone
A team of researchers, Ovul Sezer, Michael Norton, Francesca Gino, and Kathleen Vohs, studied family holiday celebrations directly. Their finding: group rituals boost enjoyment beyond what any one person doing their own private version of the same ritual could produce alone. The shared, repeated structure of the evening is doing genuine emotional work that a more efficient, ritual-free version of the same night simply could not replicate.
Opening presents one at a time isn't the slow way to do Christmas morning. It's the version built, whether your family ever consciously called it that or not, to make sure everyone actually feels the moment instead of rushing past it.
The strongest predictor of a long, happy life
This is the piece of research that surprised me most while writing this chapter. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked participants for more than 80 years, making it one of the longest studies of human life ever conducted. Its director, Dr. Robert Waldinger, summarizes the central finding simply: good relationships keep people happier and healthier, more than money, more than fame, more than any single health metric researchers measured. Participants who felt more connected to family, friends, and community lived longer and maintained sharper cognitive health into old age. Loneliness, by contrast, was associated with earlier decline across nearly every measure the study tracked.
Put plainly: an off-key phone call to sing happy birthday isn't a nice extra. It's a small, repeated deposit into the single strongest predictor of a good life that researchers have found in eight decades of looking.
Four ways to put this into practice
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Pick one tradition and repeat it twice, on purpose. That's the full threshold for something to become a ritual instead of a coincidence. It doesn't need to be elaborate. A phone call. A specific song. A particular seat at the table.
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Build a ritual for chosen family, not just family of origin. If your people don't look like a traditional family tree, the ritual doesn't have to be inherited to count. It just has to be repeated, on purpose, with people who show up for it.
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Protect the inefficient part. If you're tempted to streamline a tradition, that inefficiency is very likely the exact part doing the emotional work. Keep it slow on purpose.
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Name the tradition out loud. Research on ritual suggests shared awareness matters. Telling your people "this is our thing" turns a habit into a shared identity marker, something the group actively protects rather than something that simply happens to keep happening.
What's the tradition your people would notice immediately if it disappeared?
This is one chapter from my upcoming book, Be With: 39 Habits to Practice Joy, out September 22. I'm publishing one chapter a week as a gift to you.