Christmas traditions and festivities are incomplete without meeting your friends and family to spend some memorable time together. Every family has their own unique and fun tradition that they might have willingly or unwillingly followed for ages. A woman named Kaylee from the TikTok account of @poppy_and_kaylee shared the hilarious tradition that is followed in her family where they don't simply exchange gifts, decorate Christmas trees and hang their stocking, but also make special stockings with special "Christmas names."
Image Source: TikTok | @poppy_and_kaylee
She made a viral TikTok video to reveal the origin story of this unique tradition in her family where they get "Christmas Names." Kaylee had previously made a video to simply show her Christmas decorations but one hawkeyed viewer spotted a stocking which had "Brian" sewn on it. Since nobody in Kaylee's family is named Brian, she decided to make another video to answer the curious fellow TikTok user. “These are our Christmas names,” Kaylee said at the beginning. “Doesn’t everyone have Christmas names?”
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Any Lane
She continues to explain the real story behind all of the names. “Who is Dan and Debbie?” she quips. “They were a couple who bought gorgeous Pottery Barn stockings, probably about nine or ten years ago. For some reason, they decided that they didn’t want their stockings, so they returned them to Pottery Barn. And then Pottery Barn sold them to a discount store, for resale.” This is when her family stepped in to provide the twist to the story.
Image Source: TikTok | @poppy_and_kaylee
“Then, a young poor couple who had just had their first baby walked into this discount store and found these gorgeous stockings,” Kaylee recalled. “They only had one child at the time, but they knew they wanted to have three kids one day. So they pre-purchased matching stockings. With the intent that one day they would take out the embroidery and just have them be plain. But the mom of that family never got around to that. And probably never will.”
But these stockings never got fixed and Kaylee has kept them with her since then and every Christmas this inside joke pops out. “It has now just become an inside joke,” she concluded, “that on Christmas morning, We are Dan and Debbie and our children are Kelsey and the Brian twins.” the comment section was full of people who couldn't get enough of this whole naming fiasco during Christmas for Kaylee and her family and the hilarious backstory they shared. So numerous people left their whole comments under the video.
Image Source: TikTok | @downwithmichael
@hobos_hooligans wrote: "My husband & I got a 1st Christmas picture frame ornament. We never put our picture in it so we've been hanging 2 strangers on our tree for 25yrs." @puggle_party_wi joked: "This is wild. I’m Kelsey, my mom is Debbie, my Dad is Brian, my brother is the other Brian…but we don’t have a Dan and also never ordered from PB." @beckyj1610 commented: "We have had an ornament on our family tree since 1992 that says our family with a picture of some random family in it. That’s our Christmas joke."
Image Source: TikTok | @2lmichelle
@cup_53 shared: "I feel like your kids will get married someday and will be flabbergasted that all families don’t have special Christmas names on their stockings!" @litcounselor quipped: "My Christmas name is Eric! My husband's grandma has stockings for everyone and bought a random used one when I joined the family. My name is Amanda." @storytimeslayed added: "I did this. Found one with my husband's name and plucked out all the others intending to get them stiched on later. 7 years later I finally just caved."
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.