Every year my father leads his four boys in a specific holiday ritual. I'm not sure if it's inspired by our Hungarian, German, or Jewish roots, but the tradition calls for the men in the family to eat raw pickled herring. Apparently in the Old World this was thought to curry favor with Lady Luck, making the next year slightly less crappy than the previous one. (As an added bonus, my father promised that it would put hair on our chests. As a 7-year-old, this was not a particularly desirable side effect.)

So every New Year's Eve, Dad would prompt and cajole my brothers and me into downing a rank, mealy chunk of fish. Only one problem: about five years ago my father cornered my brothers and me on Christmas Eve, sticking that stinky jar of fish in our faces and badgering us to eat up. Seems he'd made a mistake - we'd been eating the herring on the wrong night. For 20 years. It was Christmas Eve, not New Year's Eve. He apparently never bothered to check if he was doing the tradition right.

It certainly went a long way toward explaining my family's less-than-spectacular luck streak. (The fish did deliver on the chest hair, though.) But ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's something we did as a family, and even though we hated it, it was ours, and was a centerpiece of our holiday festivities every year.

Almost every family has some kind of holiday tradition, some incredibly bizarre. And whether they're performed right or wrong, they still bring people together and help make the season a little more special.

Many of the more out-there traditions come from generations past. My grandmother passed down the pure bayberry taper, which you're supposed to light Christmas Eve so that it burns until Christmas morning; if it melts all the way down to the base, you're supposed to get good luck. A different grandmother gave us a glass pickle to hide in our tree, and whoever found it on Christmas morning was supposed to get a special prize. (We hid it the year we got it, and never found the thing; true story).

A co-worker has a Ukrainian friend whose family takes special holiday wafers, breaks them, and passes them to the other people in the room, all the while drinking copious amounts of alcohol.

As our country gets older and we lose more of the ties to our multicultural pasts, it's important for newer generations to invent traditions of their own. These can be a little more mundane - nothing can really compare to a glass Christmas pickle, after all - but they're no less important. My family has taken to making a crock full of hot meatballs for sandwiches, and then watching "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" every Christmas Eve.

Some friends down South have loaded couches into an old Bible School bus they use to putter around Central Virginia looking for tacky Christmas light displays. (Goofy hats, a CD player blasting carols, and thermoses full of hot mulled wine are compulsory).

There are as many different traditions as there are families in this country. What are some of your unique holiday traditions? Share them at rochestercitynewspaper.com.