For my family, part of the holiday fun is celebrating the traditions we have built over the years, whether it is assembling our Dickens village:

or displaying my daughter's collection of holiday water globes (and now that I think of it, I guess this was the last year for her display as she will be married with her own home next Christmas!):

or making our special Wassail punch for our Christmas movies night:

or even knowing that the first "person" to open her Christmas stocking will be Willow:

But another part of the fun comes from building new traditions as well, as we welcome others into our family circle.  This New Year's we celebrated the "old" tradition of dining on cheesy grits and rice calas cakes, New Orleans' style:

But we also celebrated the "new" by adding black eyed peas, collard greens and cornbread to our dinner menu, which is a cherished family tradition of my son's girlfriend. In the South the collard greens represent dollar bills, the peas coins and the cornbread gold, and having them all together promises a new year of prosperity.

That's the nice thing about traditions--we create them, so we can change them as we wish.  It's fun to mix things up a bit.  And it was a real surprise to discover that my whole family LOVED the collard greens!  And that's my hope for this new year--no resolutions, just a deep desire to be open to change and embrace what comes with an open mind and a loving spirit.

Happy New Year to all of you, and may we all "ring in the true" in 2014!