By the time many of you read this, we'll probably be watching the wombats.
We start with the camels, my daughters and I, on our Christmas Day trip to Brookfield Zoo. Then we move on to the bats and wombats. After that comes the aardvark.
The visit must proceed with obsessive fidelity to our annual tradition. Not only must the animals be visited in the exact same order every year, but certain rituals must be performed.
The girls must serenade the camels with the folk ditty "Sally the camel has five humps ...." The three of us must debate which wombat we would like to take home. If the aardvark is awake, we must shriek with excitement due a rock star.
We must bring sack lunches, and they must be tuna sandwiches. I must bring a Thermos of hot cocoa, and it must be homemade from real cocoa powder, not a mix.
And we must end the visit at the children's zoo, where my girls pet the guinea pig or rabbit and paint each other's faces.
Did I mention that my daughters are 21 and 24?
Behold the Christmas tradition. Our Jewish family's version may not be a typical one, but it shares a crucial quality with many another Christmas tradition:
It must never be changed.
Christmas traditions are a kind of magic, even for those of us who don't celebrate Christmas. They flower in the quiet of a day unlike any other in the year, binding us together with stories and memories.
And they open portals in time. By re-enacting the same rituals, we can travel back to all the other years when we spent the day the same way. All our Christmas mornings of the past reappear, like an annual version of Brigadoon.
The key to their power is their unchanging nature. Christmas rituals are famously sacrosanct. Uncertainty may buffet the rest of the year, but on this day stability rules. We may not know what life holds for us, but we always know what we are doing for Christmas.
And we like knowing, as anyone who tries to change a beloved tradition finds out.
Last year, Mary Kelly Burke, of Western Springs, tried to end her family's practice of waiting till the children were asleep before putting presents under the tree.
It had been sweet and simple when her five children were little and went to bed early. But now they range in age from 19 to 25. Burke couldn't stay up later than they did.
So she tried putting the presents under the tree before Christmas Eve.
Her children's response was frosty.
"It wasn't a full-blown rebellion, but there was this look like, like, 'Mom, really?'" she said. "They just had that real sad look in their eyes like I was just sort of devastating their world."
She gathered the presents back up and took them down to the basement. On Christmas Eve she waited till her big kids fell asleep, then at 2:30 a.m. hauled them back upstairs and put them under the tree.
"I learned my lesson," she said. "Don't mess with tradition."
