We’re now as far from the release of “A Christmas Story” as that film was from the 1940s Christmas it portrayed. I was thinking about that this weekend as my family pulled out the decorations and wrapped the house in lights. Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé battled for control of our kitchen speaker, with the occasional Dropkick Murphys track slipping in to keep everyone on their toes. In that mix of old traditions and new tech, it hit me how much the holidays have shifted on the surface.

When I was a kid, Christmas gift ideas meant marking up catalogs and imagining life with the GI Joe action sets that only kids in commercials ever seemed to own. We would workshop our pitches to our parents, waiting for the perfect moment to make our case. My kids, meanwhile, send curated Amazon wishlists by text, and if my daughter really wants something, she mirrors her phone to the TV and presents a full pitch deck just to tug at the heartstrings.

And, strangely to me, half of what they want now is not even physical. It is gaming currency, new skins, expansion packs. It drives me a little nuts, but I have to admit that the joy they get from a new Fortnite skin is not far from what I felt when I secretly unwrapped a hidden copy of Super Mario 64 two weeks before Christmas (sorry, Mom!).

But Christmas shopping used to be an event. We would pile into the car, wander separately through aisles under fluorescent lights, stand in different lines to protect secrecy, and simply hope that the gift we were hunting for was actually on the shelf. It was the kind of chaos that showed up in the Festivus episode of “Seinfeld” and everyone’s favorite Schwarzenegger holiday film. 

Now it is not any simpler, but it is definitely less … people-y. Instead of wandering the mall, I wander the internet and ask Siri to remind me to order presents by certain dates; little alarms meant to save me from the very specific stress of realizing on December 23 that something is still “arriving soon.”

Nothing shows how much Christmas has evolved like the lights and decor. When I was growing up, our decorations were a box of tangled incandescent bulbs that took days to unknot. Now they are still a box of tangled lights, but they are LEDs that run on a timer.

And in the ‘90s, if the house next door added a single plastic Santa, that was considered “going big.” So if you told me back then that I would one day have a 10-foot-tall inflatable Santa riding a T-Rex in my front yard, I would have said, “That’s awesome.”

And it is awesome.

But if you wanted to see a real Christmas light show when I was a kid, it had to be put on by the city, because it required tax dollars and the kind of energy draw only the Griswolds could rival. Driving through those displays, listening to the little AM station with its crackly Christmas music, always put us in the holiday spirit. Those shows still exist and are bigger than ever, but they have also inspired a new tradition: driving around neighborhoods looking for that one house that puts on its own choreographed light show set to music and Christmas movie scenes.

HOAs certainly hate them, but I love them.

When my wife and I first married twenty years ago, our Christmas Eve recipes came from ancient cookbooks we dusted off once a year. That tradition has not changed so much as shifted platforms. We used to mess up recipes because Grandma’s directions were vague; now we mess them up because TikTok lied.

We spend the evening with family, playing games and as the night winds down, we slip into our matching Christmas pajamas. Sometimes they are serious, sometimes not, and we document the moment with our phones, sending the outtakes to the family group chat instantly. It is a far cry from the disposable cameras of my youth, when you did not know if a picture had turned out until weeks later. The tools have changed, but the impulse to freeze the moment has never gone away.

And then there is the magic of anticipating Santa’s arrival. When the kids were younger, we would huddle around the Santa Tracker app, watching that little icon crawl across the globe like we were air-traffic control for the North Pole. When I was a kid, Santa watching meant staring out the car window on the drive home from family gatherings, scanning the starry sky for a streak of something magical. The medium changed, imagination to GPS, but the wonder was the same.

Then we shift into our annual Christmas movie-tourney ritual. Everyone pitches their picks, we build the bracket, and we keep the argument contained within the game. And with streaming, almost anything we choose is only a few clicks away. There is no VHS scavenger hunt, no scratched DVDs, no trips to Blockbuster on Christmas Eve — just a couple of taps and a complaint about how an obscure holiday movie from the ‘90s somehow costs $10 to rent.

And yet, underneath all the new tech and the convenience and the noise, the constant remains: the connection, the coziness inside the chaos, the anticipation that hums through the house. Eventually the night quiets, the kids go their own ways, and we cue up “The Office” Christmas episodes, finish whatever last-minute setup is needed, and settle into that familiar slow exhale, the same one I remember from my own childhood, even if everything around it looks completely different now.

The technology around us keeps evolving to solve problems, spark joy, and connect us in new ways. But in the same way "A Christmas Story" shows the holiday shifting across generations, all that innovation only highlights how steady the people at the center of it really are.