Traditions come and traditions go, especially at Christmas. Every family has its traditions. No matter how strenuously we try to preserve those traditions, they do tend to change without our noticing.

This Christmas is the first my family will spend without our Dad, and that fact has forced me to think about some of our family traditions. I’m not sad as much as I am wistful about it — there are simply some traditions in our family that will never be the same. That’s OK. Traditions are not unchangeable or unchanging.

Take the “ugly Christmas sweater” tradition. Some families are almost competitive in wearing hideously colorful sweaters at Christmas get-togethers. Mine is not one of them. It’s probably the weather around here — I remember Christmas Day temperatures in the 70s — but other families here do indulge in this tradition.

The wearing of ugly Christmas sweaters is relatively new. I don’t remember it being “a thing” at all when I was younger, and then there it was, all of a sudden. Over the past 10 or 15 years or so, this trend has morphed into tradition (a truly joyous one, in many parts). Various websites trace the history of this tradition, but the general opinion in that it got started somehow in relation to the 1989 movie, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” I have no idea; I’ve never seen the movie.

Christmas movies are another Christmas tradition for many families, and every family has its favorite — from “Miracle on 34th Street” to “Elf.” Of course, the granddaddy of all Christmas-tradition movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which seemed to be on the air on every television station at every hour of the Christmas season when I was a kid. A more recent addition to the realm of holiday Christmas classics is “A Christmas Story,” which has been aired for 24 straight hours on TNT since the 1990s.

This movie tradition is another that I don’t remember my family indulging. I have my personal favorites that I always watch this time of year, but I don’t remember us ever sitting down as a family to watch a Christmas movie.

It’s those personal traditions that are most memorable. Dad, for example, had a personal tradition that he always “observed.” We all knew about it, and we “helped” him observe it. Dad always said it wasn’t Christmas until he had heard “The Little Drummer Boy.”

I don’t know why Dad loved that song so much; he never explained it to me, even when I asked. However, he got a little misty-eyed sometime when he heard it, so it was a powerful personal tradition for him.

Dad passed that tradition down to the whole family — we all knew how much he loved it — and someone usually remarks on his love for it at some point during Christmas. I only realized how much of a thing it was for us when my sister-in-law asked me once, not long after she and my brother married some 30-odd years ago, “Has Pops heard ‘The Little Drummer Boy” yet?” She had picked up on this family tradition very quickly.

I thought about it the other day, in fact, when I heard “The Little Drummer Boy” on one of those generic Christmas music loops that stores play this time of year. Dad would have hated it; it was a modern version of the song. There was only one version of the song that would “do” for him — the 1958 version by The Harry Simeone Chorale. No matter how many singers recorded a version of this song, that was the one he wanted to hear. That was the only one that would “do.”

That got to be a little bit of a problem in the early 1990s. As more and more modern artists recorded the song, fewer and fewer radio stations played the Harry Simeone version every year. We had a vinyl LP record of it that got us along for a long time, but then we didn’t have a turntable to play it on. There were even a few years without a “proper” Christmas tradition for Dad. What to do?

I’ll never forget the utter joy I felt when I stumbled across a CD of that Harry Simeone recording — finally it would “truly” be Christmas again for Dad. I had to sneak it in, though — one of the unwritten rules is that Dad had to hear it “spontaneously.” So, I made a Christmas mix CD that included the song. If it got too close to Christmas without Dad telling me he’d heard it, I’d make sure I was playing that CD when I drove Dad somewhere. When “The Little Drummer Boy” played, he’d always say something along the lines of “Now it’s Christmas.”

Merry Christmas to all y’all — pah, rum, pum, pum, pum.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. The opinions reflected are his own.