This may have been the first Christmas holiday in my adulthood when I have not baked a single thing or prepared any part of the traditional holiday meal.

I say “may have been” because this column was written early in the week for consumption on Christmas Day, making verb tense a particularly tricky matter. Moreover, at the time of this writing I did not know for sure whether I would or wouldn’t be cooking at all, but it seemed a good bet that I’d be out of the kitchen.

Count me among the unlucky recipients of “the cold that’s been going around.” On Thursday night I went down for the count and spent the next three days, and possibly more, in bed. My husband has discussed this cold with the sort of reverence usually reserved for disasters of historic proportions. He’d have to think long and hard, he said the other night, to remember ever having had a cold quite like this one.

Physical symptoms aside, everyone knew I wasn’t faking when I gave away my KU vs. UCLA basketball ticket. I watched the game at home while my VCR taped it just in case I fell asleep.

As time passed, my family remained supportive but grew increasingly nervous — nervous that they might catch it, too, and that I might not rally in time for the holiday. As it happened, I had bought all the ingredients for baking, with the thought of spending the weekend in the kitchen. Now my loved ones were having to maneuver around the six dozen eggs and three pounds of unsalted butter I’d stashed in the refrigerator as well as other ingredients awaiting use on the counter.

There’s no less satisfying conversation than trying to explain to a nonbaker why unsalted butter has a place in the universe.

I’d also made a beginning on shopping for Christmas dinner and had all the ingredients for the potato-leek soup we often eat on Christmas Eve.

We had a family meeting Sunday night, when it became apparent that my husband and our favorite former teenager were going to have to take charge of the food and holiday entertainment. My role was unceremoniously reduced to offering advice from bed.

This gave me a rare insight into what parts of the holiday ritual really are important to the rest of the family. Take yourself out of the picture and you’ll see which things others are willing to do themselves, and which things they’ll at least complain about not having.

Here’s what I have learned about my family’s holiday druthers:

My husband wants to continue having a tree, although he’s pretty much alone in this.

Baked goods got high marks and would be missed if we didn’t have them. A clear distinction was drawn during the conversation between cookies and other holiday snack food, which were dispensable, and cakes, pies and other necessary desserts. If no one had made the indispensable desserts by Tuesday, someone would go buy them. It’s worth noting that no one could actually name these desserts, but I felt certain my family members would know them when they saw them.

No one particularly cared what we ate for any holiday meal as long as we got to eat Wheatfields white sourdough at some point during the holidays. So much for agonizing over the menu.

While everyone still wanted to do things together on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, no one wanted to do any activity associated with secular observances of the holiday such as watching holiday-themed movies. Last I heard, our planned family activity for Christmas Eve was a viewing of the 1988 NCAA men’s basketball championship on tape. The former teenager, who recalled that we had watched it together twice before, proclaimed that this was a family tradition.

In short, I learned that my family cares a lot less about the fine points of a Christmas celebration than I had realized and are willing to improvise.