The aunt who always brings the same dessert is building something. In twenty years nobody can picture the holiday without it.

Reliability turns into identity if you keep at it long enough. Bringing the same dish for twenty years looks like a lack of imagination for the first few, then quietly becomes part of the holiday, to the point where its absence would be the first thing anybody noticed. Consistency does something novelty cannot.

Choose one small thing you could be the person who always does: the playlist, the early arrival, the dish nobody else makes. Do it again next time even if nobody comments. These go unpraised for about a decade and then turn out to be load bearing.