The stories would always begin on Dec. 1, and continue nightly until Christmas Eve, a different chapter every night.

They started with us six kids in our feety pajamas gathered around dad in his chair with the water wheels on it, a fire roaring in the background. Over time, friends and neighbor kids started drifting by at the anointed hour to hear Dad’s Christmas stories.

Every night, the story would end on a cliffhanger that would make us all crazy to hear the next chapter the next night. My dad would build up to some major revelation, throw his characters into desperate circumstances facing certain death by snowball or avalanche or other winter calamity, and just at the most exciting, impossible moment, he would say: “Continued Tomorrow Night.”

Basically, it was an early version of Netflix binging. And I’m pretty sure in hindsight that Dad was making them up as he went.

Those stories were our family’s way of counting down the days of advent, building up the mystery and anticipation and even the sacredness of the coming of Christmas Day, turning Christmas into a monthlong act.

The exact details of those stories have mostly faded from memory now, but I remember images from them like talisman of the season still.

A horse who wanted to be a reindeer and headed off to the North Pole in an epic quest.

The frozen, refrigerated city of Nice, which one year malfunctioned so that its year-round snow houses and snow streets and snow buildings began to melt, threatening its very existence.

One story required us kids to come up with a gift idea toward the end of the tale and I remember proposing a ping pong table with automatic, robot paddles attached on one end so that you could play ping pong alone if there was no one else to play with. The correct gift answer was clothes and shoes for baby Jesus, if I remember right, not some self-indulgent gift for oneself. Yep, the stories always had a moral, spiritual lesson embedded in them, even if the settings were Seuss-like and surprisingly similar to our neighborhood.

The one story I remember most was the one about the town Christmas tree that went missing one year. No one was sure what happened: an act of savage vandalism to rival even the Grinch, or some mysterious supernatural force at work, like a wintry wind that had taken it away at night. Questions were asked about what the townspeople had done wrong to incur God’s wrath at Christmastime.

Search teams were dispatched, authorities alerted, helicopters and military patrols called in. No good substitute trees could be located so late in the season, and the situation got more desperate and dire with each passing day.

Then, one quiet night just a day before Christmas, one of the town’s youngest little boys, a kind of Tiny Tim clone with small legs and a big heart, was out playing in a snow bank and spied a branch with tinsel on it. He digs it out and rushes home to let the townsfolk know what he has found. A massive search by all the folks in town ensues of all the snowbanks, where more branches are dug out like hidden treasures in the boxes of an advent calendar. The hunt brings the town together as never before and rekindles their yuletide spirits.

The branches are brought to the town square and painstakingly reassembled piece by broken piece with Extra Strength Super Powerful Super Glue into a magnificent Christmas tree again. Lights are strung, ornaments attached, tinsel retossed.

The ending of that story still resonates: All the families of the town gather in a great circle around its reconstructed tree, singing “O Tannenbaum” with a newfound appreciation for the many limbs that make up that sacred evergreen and, by unspoken extension, a fresh appreciation for each other.

I suppose all our Christmas and holiday traditions are like that tree and my dad’s stories, so freighted with tradition and memory from our holiday gatherings over the years that they become something greater than just stories and branches. They become the sticks of the loom on which we reweave the ties that rebind us every Christmas.

It’s been a long time since those sacred days in St. John’s Parish, where the houses stood like Catholic forts all around the neighborhood, eight kids here, 10 there, 12 over on Josephine Street. Big Catholic families like that are few and far between now, but back then they filled the neighborhood with the constant, joyful screeches of children at play everywhere.

We’ve gotten far away from some of those old religious rituals, too, like caroling concerts in the school cafeteria, my sisters wearing veils to church and midnight Mass with everyone holding a candle so that the church looked like a skyful of those stars over Bethlehem.

And family members and friends who gathered at my dad’s foot have mostly scattered to the four corners, some gone forever, some far removed now from those religious roots. Many of us do our own, individual celebrations now, even more so it seems since the pandemic sapped our will to gather. I sometimes find myself nostalgically longing to put those childhood days and people back together again like that town did that tree.

But funny how the stories remain. Stories that defy time and obliterate distance, stories that we are all still a part of, that still bring us together, that make us who we are. You ever notice that when good friends or family members gather back together after a long time apart they immediately start telling funny stories about memorable or embarrassing moments. Remember when James lit the tinsel on fire and nearly burned down the tree? Remember when Tom dove into the lake at The Broadmoor in his tuxedo? Remember when Justin ate the glass Christmas ornament shaped like a cake, and spent Christmas in the hospital?

We’re retelling our family myths when that happens, reestablishing the narratives that connect us into a larger whole.

Rainer Marie Rilke said it succinctly: The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

Eventually all of us, I suppose, become stories after we’re gone, subsumed into great arcing family narratives that somehow memorialize, uplift and sanctify the hopes and fears of our years together.

And the best-told of those stories, well, let’s pray they last and last, always and forever “Continued Tomorrow Night.”