To spend the holidays together and create memories, friends often hold special friendship-centered holiday traditions.
Whether it be Friendsgiving, gift exchanges, or even plate smashing, friends create fun traditions that allow them to spend the holidays together and create memories that will last forever.
For senior Lily Hassett, ever since seventh grade, she and her friends always do a Friendsgiving where they all bring a bunch of different foods to share and have a “giant meal” together.
“It’s special to me because we all share what we’re thankful for and get the opportunity to have our own little Thanksgiving,” Hassett said.
She especially appreciates that it gives Hassett and her friends a chance to see each other over break.
A “unique” tradition senior Anna Stratton and her friends share is smashing plates on New Year’s Eve.
“Over winter break for New Year’s, my friends and I buy ceramic plates and write on them, with Sharpies, all the things we worried about or didn’t like about the year,” Stratton said.
Once they fill those plates with their negative feelings about the year, they go outside and smash them.
They originated this tradition from a video they found online of some girls smashing plates for their exes.
“We saw it on social media with girls using it to get over their exes and then adapted it for New Year’s and our friend group,” Stratton said.
Stratton finds this as a “healthy” way to get over stress that they may feel throughout the year.
“It’s kind of like New Year’s resolutions,” Stratton said, “leaving the worries of this year in the past and looking forward to the new year that will hopefully have less tribulations.”
When it comes to senior Lena Smith, although her friends don’t have a specific activity they always do, their tradition is having a holiday party together.
“While the festivities vary, it always involves some sort of gift-giving,” Smith said. “Some years we’ll do a Secret Santa and others we’ll do a white elephant.”
According to Smith, they all arrive in festive outfits, exchange gifts and then move on to other holiday activities.
“Typically, we all either arrive in our pajamas or decked out in holiday gear, and from there we’ll hand out our gifts, initiate a gingerbread house competition, wind down with a classic holiday film, or even break out some holiday karaoke,” Smith said.
At junior Elise Holly’s dance studio, the advanced dancers have a tradition of doing a Pollyanna gift exchange while preparing for their performance of “The Nutcracker.”
“Since it’s with a really big group of people it gives a chance to connect with people we wouldn’t normally talk to as much,” Holly said.
This opportunity to grow closer to her fellow dancers has created great memories that Holly will fondly “look back on.”
