David and Dawn Hall love Christmas traditions. Each year they display the same nativity set, get together with family and circle presents around their Christmas tree.
But seven years ago, they added a rather untraditional tradition to their Yuletide celebration. They started giving the very same gift to family and close friends every single year.
The gift is a calendar – The Hall Family Quote-A-Day-Calendar, to be exact. It’s homemade, never has photos and is guaranteed to have typos. And yet, says Dawn: “It’s absolutely the best gift we have.”
The quotes aren’t by self-help gurus or long-dead diplomats. They’re a collection of the strange and funny things the Halls’ family and friends have said throughout the year.
“I always have a pen and pad with me, so if I hear something good, I can write it down,” says Dawn. David does the same, scribbling bits of conversation on a napkin or anything else that’s handy. “You have to wait and look at it again in a couple of days, to see if it’s still funny,” he says.
Both say they always hear enough to fill a calendar. “It is amazing to me that now, in our eighth year, we can still come up with 365 new things,” he adds. “But we usually have plenty.”
David started the calendar in 1996, after his sister gave their family a daily calendar that was “really lame,” he says. “In a short but significant fit of insanity, I decided we’d do a calendar ourselves.”
He and Dawn started what they thought was a one-time project, keeping track of the quotes on their home computer. When Christmas neared, they printed them out and gathered in the living room to cut and collate. When Christmas arrived, they finally shared the secret they’d been keeping all year.
“I’ll never forget it,” says Dawn. “They were so amazed at what we had done, with no commercial assistance.”
When David’s mother saw it, she sat down and cried, then read it all in one sitting, telling him, “You cannot stop doing this.”
He didn’t. “It’s a lot of work, but it never feels like a burden,” he says. “I’ll keep doing it until I get tired of it, it gets hard or quotes stop coming. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
The list of calendar recipients has almost tripled over the years, thanks to more friends asking to receive a copy. Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church pastor Blaire Monie now gets one, after hearing about it at a party. “We’re secretly hoping it’ll be quoted in a sermon,” Dawn says.
But getting a calendar doesn’t come easily. “You have to beg, and I mean beg properly,” she says with a laugh. “Then we’ll take it under advisement and let you know.”
The Halls says the best part of the calendar tradition is giving a gift that people really enjoy. An added bonus, though, is how it keeps them paying attention to the funny things in life.
“The whole process makes us stop and savor the moment,” Dawn says. “It’s really become a part of our lives.”
