When it comes to maintaining family Christmas traditions, the responsibility tends to pass down the female line, where a small spirit of rebellion occasionally kindles a longing to sweep away the more burdensome old customs.
In these cases it often turns out that the children, rather than the parents, represent the ancien régime, with its elaborate, unalterable rituals. My heart went out to the author of a recent letter to the Telegraph, who decided to discontinue her custom of buying a couple of extra Advent calendars for her grown-up sons to count down the days before their Spring birthdays - only for her eldest son to buy his own calendar and hand it to her, with instructions to keep going.
A traditionalist when it comes to Advent calendars, this year I am planning a couple of changes, one of which should prove popular, while the other may cause outrage. As a child, I didn't question the rule that the Christmas decorations should go up on Christmas Eve and come down again at Epiphany. My son, by contrast, questioned it vociferously. Our next-door-neighbour's house was festooned with decorations from early November, and the child felt our own austere arrangement a breach of his festive rights.
Last Christmas Eve, grappling with fairy lights while the choir of King's College, Cambridge warbled its newly commissioned carols, it finally struck me that there were better ways of doing this. So off I went last week to find a tree - to find that only monsters or midgets were left. The nice chap who sold me the last moderately sized specimen in Kent said that people were starting Christmas earlier than ever - desperate, presumably, for cheer amid the encircling gloom.
As for taking it all down again - while I hesitate to disagree with an authority as eminent as Nicky Haslam, who recently decreed that "all decorations must be taken down pretty much on Boxing Day", I'm afraid he is wrong. There is something joyless about the premature stripping of decorations. Epiphany is the earliest it should happen - and there are good precedents for keeping the tinsel up until Candlemass (as Richard E Grant says, "It's churlish not to").
My second break with tradition will cause more trouble: this year marks the demise of the Christmas stocking. I have kept Santa's well-stuffed shooting sock going for decades. But as the child has gained a professional career and a hipster beard, the once modest contents (chocolate coins, Beano annual) have become ever more expensive and troublesome to source. After last year's offering was described as "utilitarian", the spirit of rebellion ignited, and Santa's stocking was irrevocably retired.
I have read the descriptions in children's books of the awful disappointment of waking to find no lumpy woollen sausage hanging from the end of the bed, so I am braced for chagrin. But times change and we change with them: tradition links us to the past; but when nostalgia traps us there, it is time to find new traditions.
At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a new exhibition, Oracles, Omens and Answers, explores the practice of fortune-telling from antiquity to the present day. The exhibits include oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty China, a 16th-century armillary sphere... and one of those plastic fish you used to find in Christmas crackers that told your fortune by curling up in your palm.
In general, I have absorbed the awful lessons of plastic waste - the hideous ocean gyres and entangled turtles.
But we all have our lapses - and I have a guilty affection for the small plastic prizes that used to tumble out of the cheaper sort of Christmas cracker. Fortune-telling fish, jumping frogs, an inexplicable tiny hamster on wheels - over the years I have accumulated quite the collection, and they still make me smile.
But these days the contents of crackers from budget to luxury are relentlessly dull: cheerless tea-infusers and nail-clippers; recyclable artisanal tchotchke - or (worst of all) jolly games.
Will any of these, in a few years' time, still be providing a small daily spark of joy - let alone finding a place in an exhibition at the Bod? I'm pretty sure the library's fortune-telling fish could give us the answer.