Louise East on her first Christmas away from home

Tradition is big in my family when it comes to Christmas: not the traditional traditions - stuffed goose, egg nog and carols around an open fire - but idiosyncratic family traditions that grew out of the years when my sister and I were very small.

There's the annual squabble about whether Santa is bringing stockings to twentysomethings this year, the last-minute panicky efforts to find the linen tablecloth used once a year, and the scrabbling under the massive Christmas tree to find the habitually missing present.

I never really thought about these Christmas traditions until I wasn't there to take part in them. Waking on Christmas morning in a Guatemalan orphanage four years ago, tangled in mosquito netting and sweat and surrounded by dripping jungle, I immediately started to work out where in the day my family in Ireland would be.

Would they have opened presents yet? Would they be sitting down to eat? I had done it myself so many times I reckoned I could guess exactly what they were doing at any given moment. This was just as well because talking to them was out of the question - the nearest phone was upriver by about 40 minutes and trying to establish a phone connection to Ireland was a little like searching for the missing Mars probe. I toyed with the idea of getting homesick that morning - the irony of family tradition is that its very repetitiveness is what makes it so hard to miss. But with that, the day whirled into a kind of chaos that was just as Christmas-y after its own, eccentric fashion.

The big festive-markers of orphanage life were killing the pig and new shoes; although a Santa Claus did arrive in the afternoon courtesy of some American ex-pats downriver, he was completely upstaged by the arrival of a whole consignment of second-hand footwear from the US.

Then there was meat - small, fatty lumps of meat, the first we had seen in months. The children tucked into this with much crowing, unperturbed by the fact they were eating the friend we had gone to visit on our daily walk for the past few months. When Santa arrived it was on a small motor boat decorated with slightly soggy antlers. Quite understandably, most of the small children took one look at this fat, beardy weirdy and burst into shrieks of terror. These only really ceased after the footballs, dolls and toy shops had been dispensed, squabbled over and broken or lost in the river.

Later that night the volunteers got together and cooked a voluminous Christmas dinner of vegetarian spaghetti bolognaise and got merrily drunk on rum. I had finally stopped working out which part of the Christmas Day schedule I was missing, realising that I was forging my own traditions here. And sure wasn't it St Stephen's Day in Ireland now, anyway?

Victoria White on her first Christmas as a married woman

The priests of the tribe had to come knocking and put me through their two all-time favourite rituals - marriage and Christmas - at the one time, for me to look myself in the mirror and see the truth: I was one of them.

I was married and it was Christmas and for the first time I would have Christmas at the home of someone who was not one of the tribe - that is, someone who had not been initiated into the sacred rituals of my grandmother's Christmas in Donegal. Before anyone starts whooping and thinking of Dancing at Lughnasa, let me mention quickly that we are a Protestant family - yes, Protestant and proud of it.

We not only had a real tree, we decorated it with real candles, which only set the tree on fire the odd time (all people with fairy-lights were considered dodgy, but as for those with winking lights - well, words fail me).

Even if I had been up until 8.37 a.m. on Christmas Day, making merry with the youths of the neighbourhood, I was at the kitchen table at 9 a.m., in my Sunday best, for a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and tinned grapefruit. No-one would ever have been disrespectful enough of the ritual to have suggested the addition of grilled tomatoes - or (peals of laughter) fresh grapefruit!

Then, as the merry bells rang out over the rooftops, it was off to church, hymn-books under our arms (the old hymn-book of course - so much more authentic). We met the rector with a cheery grin and sang our hearts out - after all, we had to get a year of church-going into this one visit.

While every other child in the city had the presents well-broken by this stage, Santa, for some reason best known to himself, reserved my presents for after dinner. Between them and me was a field of hurdles - a brown bird, vats of sprouts . . . not forgetting Beecher's Brook itself, the flaming pudding. At the end of all of that I would have earned my presents, wouldn't I?

So picture my face as I sat in my brand-new-husband's sitting-room last Christmas, watching my glamorous sister-in-law, her legs tucked under her on the couch, popping one, two, three, four chocolates into her mouth before dinner. They didn't seem to have a set ritual at all - they seemed to want to do what they liked, even if that included watching a good film after dinner!

So is it back to their place this year? No, this year it's my turn, and let's be quite clear about this - my sister may be barbecueing kangaroo in Australia, my brother in Scotland may not exit his dressing-gown until mid-morning, but I will keep the traditions of the tribe alive if it kills me. And them. The in-laws will come to me, and they will have to do their best to keep their noses clear to catch the smell when the real candles start smouldering on the tree.

Frank McNally on his first Christmas with a baby

When I think about our first Christmas with Roisin, I remember us strolling in an almost deserted Phoenix Park on Christmas morning. One of those pleasantly dismal December days when the sun makes a half-hearted attempt to break through the clouds, but gives up around lunchtime and takes the rest of the afternoon off.

Then wondering slowly back to our house in Kilmainham - it was my first Christmas Day in Dublin too - for a long-drawn-out dinner with roast duck. And after that the three of us just sitting in front of the fire for the evening, as the darkness gathered in around us like a blanket.

Unfortunately, my wife Teresa says this was all two years ago and Roisin hadn't been born yet.

Last Christmas we went to my family in Monaghan, apparently - a point confirmed by my diary. But I'm damned if I can remember anything about it. And Teresa, although head of central records section in our house, can't recall much either.

I do vaguely recollect driving to Carrickmacross on Christmas Day, listening to Rodrigo's Concierto De Aranjuez on the stereo while Roisin (then five months) performed choral variations on the theme in protest at being confined to the car seat. But as for the rest, I can only assume that when we got there, we handed the baby straight to her grandmother and then slept for 36 hours. A grim statement on the nature of parenting, but there it is.

It was ferociously stormy in Monaghan - I was driving around back-roads on the days after Christmas and I had to swerve to avoid the roof of a shed which had blown off - and there was snow on higher ground. So Roisin - who was probably suffering from one of the 42 head colds (an Irish baby record, I believe) she had in her first year - would have been confined to port much of the time.

I feel guilty about not remembering more, because it was her only Christmas alone with us. Her brother Patrick was born three weeks ago, and it's a little sad to see Roisin - now a mature 17-month-old - taking on the responsibilities of a carer.

Whenever Patrick is being changed, she insists on helping: handing us the nappy and tearing up pieces of cotton wool, and then getting the Sudocrem and, ever-so-carefully, spreading it on the floor. (She's easily distracted from her caring responsibilities, especially when there's Sudocrem involved.)

Anyway, I think I'll gradually go back to remembering our first Christmas as the one in the Phoenix Park - when she was with us, if only in embryonic form. And to a weekend shortly before that, when we strolled around another park, New York's Central, reflecting on the responsibilities of impending parenthood. Somehow, we haven't found the time for strolling in parks this year.