I have had the same New Year’s Eve tradition since I was quite young. Its not really much of a tradition, but I like it. My family is always up in Whistler skiing. For New Years, we stay in our little condos, have my grandma or Dad cook tacos for us and stay up to watch their Fire and Ice Show and watch fireworks. The Fire and Ice Show is where they build a large jump on the bottom pitch of the mountain. Then people go off the jump and do tricks. For the main event, a ring of fire is placed at the top of the jump and skiers and snowboarders fly through it. They always finish off the event with a display of fireworks. If I’m going to be totally honest, I haven’t stayed up to watch the fireworks in many years, but that’s what I want to talk about.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how some of the main traditions of my families have changed. There are still traditions, things or events we do every year, but little things have changed within them. The activities and the organization have changed. This is not a bad thing in an any way, but I find it all very interesting.

Let’s start with Christmas Eve. Every year my family hosts a Christmas Eve party with at least the same two families, sometimes more depending on the year. This started when we were really young (I asked my parents and they don’t even remember). It started with just one other family and we would switch off who hosted it, but now it's always at our house. Somewhere along the way, a second family got added because they didn’t have anywhere to go on Christmas Eve, and there has been a dusting of other families here and there, but I really want to look at what we actually do at the event. When we were young, we constantly spent the whole evening running to and from the computer to use Norad the Santa Tracker to find out how far away Santa was from our home city of Seattle. Now we do a white elephant exchange that includes large amounts of alcohol, this year including a Smirnoff Ice and a Gallon Beer Jug. Most of the kids that are at the party are now 21, so gifts are largely alcohol-related. The evening used to always be finished off with a game of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," which we sadly threw away this year. But now it often includes some sort of drinking game. It started a few years ago with beer pong, and this year it was some game called Drinkmaster Says. As we’ve grown, so have our events, from little kid games to drinking games, and from Santa-tracking to adult gift-giving.

Now let’s circle back to New Year’s Eve. The drinking age in Canada is only 19. Many of the older kids in my family, most of them in fact, go out on New Year’s Eve to a club in Whistler and celebrate New Year's in the traditional way. Next year, I will be eligible to do that and I’m sure my family will encourage me to go, but I cant say I don’t enjoy eating tacos and tucking myself into bed at 10:45.