Holidanium: How my family created one über winter holiday to encompass them all

If you are like me, the holidays are a time for Hallmark movie marathons, engorging yourself on homemade feasts and, unfortunately, stress. For many of us who have made the Queen City our home, the holiday season means over-planning, military levels of coordination, and seemingly never-ending travel.

I’m the youngest of four boys, and my family anticipated this circumstance and found a solution: Holidanium, the Uber Holiday.

Shortly after my eldest brother moved to Hawaii, my parents quickly realized that our family traditions would be shaken.

As we tallied the celebrations, we found that November through January contained 12 distinct celebrations among birthdays, anniversaries and holidays — an unreasonable number for a growing and distributed family.

Luckily, my family is adaptable (read: strange) and not tied to tradition in the typical sense. We have always valued spending quality time together over holiday convention — the most important thing has always been to have the whole family together enjoying ourselves.

It was in this spirit that my father, now lovingly known a Pa-Yoda or YoPa, suggested, “Why don’t we just celebrate everything all at once?”

And so, Holidanium was born.

Holidanium is a unique holiday meant to remove the stress, the rigid planning and the strict guidelines from the holiday season. Similar to my high school alumnus Jerry Seinfeld’s idea of Festivus, Holidanium is a holiday for everyone.

However, unlike Festivus (see the rules here) Holidanium is more open-ended — a holiday truly for everyone.

Holidanium takes place on the first Saturday after Christmas. This is for a few reasons: (1) family and friends who work in service can more easily request off; (2) gifts are cheaper after Christmas; and (3) Saturday holidays are objectively better.

Our totem is a colorful stick with pegs for hanging pictures, icons, Star Wars memorabilia, and a host of other trinkets.

Holidanium is broken up into 15-minute windows throughout the celebration, which guests sign up for once they arrive. A guest could write down ‘Mark’s 25th Birthday” for 7:15 p.m., for instance. At 7:15, that guest would lead the celebration, including a cheers, gift-exchange and any other associated events that they planned.

At 7:30 p.m., we’d move on to the next item on the sheet.

At our first Holidanium we celebrated many events, including six birthdays, Christmas Eve, Christmas, Hanukkah, two engagements, three professional accomplishments, one promotion, three moves, two honored guests’ presences, and New Year’s Eve.

Holidanium dinner should always reflect the local cuisine. For us New Yorkers, this meant a dozen pizzas and three kegs of beer.

However, whatever you choose should always be easy to buy, make and serve. The essence of Holidanium is to strip away the stress and rigidity of other holidays and focus on one thing: enjoying time with family and friends.

If you want to celebrate your own version of Holidanium, use the hashtag #Holidanium2018 on social media. I’ll show my dad, YoPa, who to reply to and he’ll likely make your celebration even better.

Happy Holidanium.

This story was originally published December 10, 2017 at 11:00 PM with the headline "Holidanium: How my family created one über winter holiday to encompass them all."