Our funny little Christmas tradition

Pencils down on Christmas Eve

A look at the festivities according to AI Norman Rockwell

All families are a little strange. I’m lucky that my family’s eccentricities are mostly harmless, sometimes productive, and even a little fun. There’s no better encapsulation of this than the annual Neary Christmas Contest.

A number of years ago, in the midst of planning our annual pilgrimage home for the holiday, my dad came to us with a proposal: a writing contest.

Well, a “Neary rap” was actually how he put it, but the basic instructions were to write a rhyming couplet about each member of the family to be read aloud on Christmas Eve.

No one knew what to expect from each other, but everyone came through with their own style and we’ve done it every year since the inaugural contest in 2015. We’ve had a Hamilton-inspired prompt, a sonnet, a cold open for the Christmas episode of a sitcom based on the Neary family, and a lot of laughs.

It’s silly and low stakes and more than a few lines are written on the day they’re due, but it’s fun to think how uniquely ours this tradition is. Maybe I’m undercounting the Brontës of present day, but I think what we do is pretty rare and even rarer that we’re all willing to participate year after year, but that’s what’s great about traditions. Even silly little things that you keep up can keep you together.

This year I have the honor of decreeing the format and competitors are tasked with writing a Wikipedia page for a future family descendant. It could be the next generation or a someone living in 2500, but if you want to win, you’d do well to weave in a family story that’s been referenced a hundred times but still makes everyone laugh.