As holiday traditions go, there are those that bring smiles, those that bring laughs, and those that turn the entire family into a hot, sloppy mess. For the Bellavance family, however, they are tears of joy, thanks to a one-time whim which has since become an annual event none of them would give up. The tears that flow each year, they say, are there only because this new tradition has brought their close-knit family closer than even they could have imagined.

It wasn’t always easy for the Bellavances, at their Stevens Mills Road home, in Auburn. The father, Louis, had muscular dystrophy, which forced the mom, Lorraine, to spend her life hustling for all she was worth, whether it was chasing bobbins at the Hill Mill (where Davinci’s Restaurant is today), chasing numbers in a variety of bookkeeping jobs, or chasing after her five children.

The family didn’t have much, but they had love, and each other, and maybe that’s what imbued their possessions with extra meaning. Whether it was furniture, or knick-knacks, or holiday decorations, things in the Bellevance household were more than mere stuff to be cycled out easily whenever someone got tired of looking at it. Those things were there every day, every month, every year, as ingrained into their daily existence as the common air they breathed.

By the late ‘90s, Louis had been dead for many years and the oldest Bellavance child, Mark, had recently passed away from complications of the MD he had inherited. By then, the remaining children were all adults with families of their own and Lorraine had downsized out of the family home into an apartment, where she retained one large piece of furniture with an heirloom-like quality.

It was a large secretary desk her parents had purchased when she was a little girl growing up in Rumford. For the Bellavance children, the desk had been more than a wooden hutch stuck in a corner. Each one had memories of pressing it into service as a pretend post office, playing at sorting mail into its many pigeonhole slots.

Bellavance did not really think her children would fight over the desk when she died, but it was something that had special meaning to each of them, each slot on its face a seeming repository for childhood memories. So, in 1998, she hit upon a novel idea.

Today, she cannot quite remember how it occurred to her, but here is what she did: She gave each of her four surviving children a card. After the annual reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” in which a book is passed and each member of the family reads a stanza of the famous poem, Bellavance had each child draw one of the cards at random.

On the card drawn by her youngest child, Kirk, she had written a simple note, “You get the desk.”

“I was blown away and, I would say, in shock,” recalled Kirk. “It didn’t hit me until a day or two later what I’d actually got.

“I remember using that desk to play post office, and library,” said Kirk. “As a child, those are some of the first games I played. Now, to have that with me, and to think of the history of that desk, of all the people who’ve touched it, and all the people it’s touched, it’s quite overwhelming.”

Far from being jealous, the Bellavance brood fell spontaneously into a group hug, tears flowing freely, in support of the gift.

“There are some families that might get into fisticuffs over stuff, which is kind of sad,” said Kirk’s older brother, Eric. “But, this way, there’s no question of who gets what, and mom gets to see the enjoyment of each person having something from their childhood while she’s still around.”

The nature of the random draw also helps to soothe any false sense of favoritism. “I leave it in God’s hands that it goes where it was meant to be,” said Bellavance.

And so it has gone each year. Given the emotions that broke forth after the surprise bequeathment, and the fun of all the family stories prompted by the gift, Bellavance chose to repeat the process the following year, and has done so each year since.

Each year it is a different item, with a different meaning. Some are crafty things of family folk art, like the knit Christmas tree that went to oldest daughter Paula, who has since also succumbed to MD. Others reflect the family’s Franco heritage, like the framed fabric with the words “Benissez notre demeure” painted on it. That went to daughter Sheila, as did the bust of Jesus that came into the family as a promotional item given with the purchase of an encyclopedia set.

Other items have come down through multiple generations, like the vase of purple glass Sheila received, which had been a 1933 wedding gift to Bellavance’s mother, or the ceramic statue of a woman that went to Eric.

“It’s not much,” said Bellavance. “It lost its arm at some point. But it belonged to my grandmother and I can remember playing with ‘the lady’ as a child myself.”

The statue was most often used as a simple doorstop, said Bellavance, but that put it at perfect kid height, and, thus, there is a memory of almost every adult in the family having crawled over at least once to engage “the lady” in a baby-talk dialogue.

And, if some items given have been touched by every member of the Bellavance family, others are sacred for their relative lack of use, like the family bible that went to Kirk, or the commemorative plate, printed with a calendar for the year 1952, that went to Eric.

“It was the year I graduated from high school,” explained Bellavance. “I got it at a jewelry store on Lisbon Street. It was called Roger’s, I think. I used to work at W. T. Grant’s [department store] and I’d pass it every day on my walk to work. I don’t know why, exactly, but I just wanted to have it.”

That story of a shop girl’s impulse, which might have gone untold but for the gift, is what makes each item a treasure, said Eric.

“It’s because it’s from mom,” he said. “She doesn’t have a lot, she never did have a lot, but she’s very generous with what she does have. These are the things of value. I don’t know if they’d have value if they went on the Antiques Roadshow, but I couldn’t place a [monetary] value on these things.”

“It’s gotten so we look forward to this every year,” agreed Sheila. “Who’s going to get the gift and, more important, what’s it going to be?”

Bellavance said she rarely knows herself very far in advance, sometimes not until the first guests arrive on Christmas Eve. Does she know yet what this year’s gift will be?

“I think I have an idea,” she said, with a mischievous grin. “But we’ll just have to wait and see.”