A few weeks have passed since Christmas, but the memories of family and joy will linger no matter how you celebrated, whether in the traditional manner or by developing a tradition of your own. There is a family in Mathews who has done just that.

The 2023 Advent program of Gwynn’s Island Baptist Church includes a story titled Creating New Traditions written by Wayne Pulley. It is a story of how the Pulleys decided in 2022 to simplify their Christmas holiday. “We broke traditions.”

Wayne begins his story, “We generally think of Christmas as a time for family and joy, feasting, sharing gifts, shopping, cooking, decorating the house and finding the perfect tree to decorate with our treasured ornaments. It takes much time to do all of this getting ready and the not-fun time of putting it all away.” Then he added “as many of you who read this might know, we have a large immediate family… so we decided to do something different. We broke tradition. We simplified the cooking to several...