I took this picture last week watching families during the 4th of July fireworks in Portland. Moms, dads, and kids had picnics and gathered on bridges to celebrate. It made me wonder. What does your family do during the holidays? How important do you think it is to establish traditions for your family that become memories? There is an intrinsic value in creating traditions for your children. Experts claim that good traditions are healthy for kids.
• Traditions can give children a sense of security.
It is important to establish some things for your family that will be consistent when everything else is constantly changing.
• Traditions can build a bond between family members.
Spending quality time together with extended family during strategic times can have the potential to nurture important relationships.
• Traditions can remind everyone they are connected to a bigger story.
They are actually a great time for storytelling. You can tell your kids stories about them when they were younger that they forgot. Your parents will probably tell your children stories about you that you would rather them not know. But there is an unusual power in a child hearing the stories that connect them to a bigger family.
• Traditions are a strategic opportunity to communicate the value of family.
Here are a few traditions my parents handed down to me.
Every Christmas, my dad would wire our house with external speakers and play Christmas carols outside for the entire neighborhood. (If he tried that today, he would probably get fined by the Homeowners Association.)
Every summer, we would spend a week on the farm where my mom grew up. (One summer they actually paid my cousin to pay me to work for a week bailing hay, just so they could see me do hard labor.)
Every Sunday night, a group of families we know would go over to someone’s house and play games. (I think I learned the importance of community more after church than during church.)
It is even important to create traditions that are just between you and your kids.
- How and when you say “I love you”
- What you do when you tuck your kids into bed
- How you spend Saturday mornings
- What do you do for Sundays at lunch
Let’s collect some ideas over the next few days to generate different ways parents can create traditions for their kids. Tell us one or two traditions that either you or your parents created that have had a positive effect in your family.
One family tradition that my mom did with her mom, she did with me and now I do with my kids is baking sugar cookies at Christmas. We not only to make cookies,but we use this opportunity to remember and talk past Christmas memories, the people we love and what we really appreciated about the past year.
Our next family tradition is one my husband and I started which is family fun day – especially in the summer. This is especially good to implement if vacations as a family are not possible. Once a week, we do something as a family. We have made an effort to make time for our kids by doing things together. Sometimes it is just doing to store and buying lots of things for ice cream sundaes and having those instead of lunch. Other times it may be events or planned activities. The main idea is the tradition of time and getting to do what they want and have a voice. We have been able to talk and communicate many things during this day and wouldn’t give it up!
After reading this I thought it would be fun to see if my kids noticed any traditions in our family time. My youngest quickly reminded me that our annual trips to a family camp in Arkansas were his favorite family tradition. You know what? It’s actually mine too. It’s the one time in the year that we completely unplug (there is no cell phone or internet service!) and reconnect without all the normal distractions.
I remember the wonderful times and conversations that my dad and I use to have sitting with the old hand crank ice cream maker. I think I just enjoyed sitting and being quiet with my dad because he worked a lot and I had him all to my self. I don’t like the new electonic ice cream makers because you can not hear yourself think when you crank that thing up.
I have tried to start traditions with my own little family. We have been going through many changes in our life and the time my husband, son and I get to spend time together are very cherished moments. My son is four and about to turn five and time is getting short to make those traditions.
Two Christmas’ ago we had our kids memorize the birth story of Jesus from Luke 2:8-14. They were 5 and 7 at the time. Now each Christmas we all recite it as a family along with doing our Advent calendar. It sort of reminds us of “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” when Linus gets up on stage and tells Charlie Brown what the real meaning of Christmas is! We watch the program each year too!
We always have a big weekend breakfast. We try to have family meals together every day but we never miss our weekend breakfast. We talk about our plans for the day, the kids fight over the last sausage and my husband and I just smile because we know that in a few years (ok, 11 years) our oldest son will be going to college and those weekend breakfasts as a whole family will be over. During the holidays our weekend breakfasts are expanded. I get up even earlier, we put out fancy plates and silver and really enjoy ourselves. My kids don’t notice the difference now, but one day I hope they remember those as even more special because not only was their yummy food, but the place looked great!
Cinnamon Roll Saturday! The pop open the cylinder, throw them in the round pyrex, fight over the middle one kind of cinnamon rolls! (okay, so I do buy the reduced fat ones).
My kiddos wake up to that smell every Saturday morning. It gets us started all together around the table. Saturdays are always crazy. This is a low stress, sweet way to start our family day.
And you know if I’m out, someone’s in the car at 6a. You don’t miss Cinnamon Roll Saturday.
Now I want to start cinnamon roll Saturday! We have lots of family traditions centered around holidays. They usually involve sports–Turkey Bowl, Santa Bowl, Egg Series. This is something that we have done since I was a kid and continue to do now that we have kids of our own. Even though I really don’t enjoy playing the sport, I certainly enjoy the tradition of what we do. It’s fun to look back and remember all the fun over the years and to see my own children getting to participate.
It’s interesting how so many traditions involve food. I used to pick up my son every Friday after highschool with a Pasquale’s pepperoni pizza – It was a long drive home from Gainesville and a great bonding experience.
When our 4 kids were elementary age we created “candle night.” One night a week during the school year we had dinner by candlelight only. Our kids looked forward to it. (Disclaimer, all 4 kids had to have their own candle to blow out at the end of dinner to keep peace!) It slowed life down for about 30 minutes, and somehow an average weeknight dinner became special.
A great tradition for us has been, and still is, at Thanksgiving. Our home and table is open to anyone who wants to come and/or have nowhere else to go. It is a full-on production in the kitchen with each family member making their own special dishes (please note the plural!) to be served. It’s an amazing time with great company, great conversation, delicious food, and new things to celebrate and be thankful every year.
LUPPER. Necessity is the mother of all invention, right? Well, my wife and I have four kids ranging from ages 14 down to 3 and dining out is always a harrowing experience. So we figured that going out to eat in the middle of the day,–its not lunch and its not supper–when there are fewer other guests to offend, might be less stressful. So most every Saturday we enjoy “lupper.” We rotate the privilege of choosing the restaurant through the family so that everybody gets a turn and stays relatively happy. Our kids are the only people they know who “do lupper” and my wife and I cherish the time. Its a pretty unique family tradition.
We have a wide array of traditions that hold true from year to year. New pjs on Christmas Eve, kringle on Christmas morning, birthday dinners cooked according to request and served on the “You are Special” red plate. But we’ve also seen some traditions develop that we didn’t necessarily plan, but that have become traditions all the same. Grandma baking 16 pies every year for a total of 10 people, a game or two of horseshoes on Thanksgiving Day and the gathering up of quarters to play the claw machine at the hotel during our annual visit to Wisconsin. Our kids seem to cherish those unplanned, not entirely thought out traditions just as much as the ones we intentionally thought out ahead of time. Pretty cool!
Becky, I agree with you. For our family (quickly growing at three teenagers now) our favorite traditions are the ones that we never expected or planned. I’m constantly amazed at how these rhythms in life have such an impact – and have created a sence of security and belonging. I love it most when I overhear my kids tell their friends about our quirky traditions without the slightest hint of embarrassment. Watch for those rhythms. They don’t need to look ” traditional ” or grand.
We have some holiday traditions too; however, the timing of many of them has had to be amended a bit since my divorce because I don’t always have my daughter ON the holiday. In general though, we have Thanksgiving (with family) with homemade cloverleaf rolls that my Grandma taught me to make… and I have now taught her to make; the trimming of the tree; Christmas cookies and candies; the calendar that counts down the days till Christmas, which lets her open a door every day, revealing a special treat each day; the reading of the Christmas story; summers at Aunt Tanga’s with all the cousins; prayers before bedtime; kisses every morning and night and we do butterfly, eskimo, hippo and turtle kisses; we never go to bed angry…something my grandma taught me; we read the Bible every day; i read her a kids’ devotional and we read a book (or chapter or two from it); i’ve taught her many traditions surrounding Easter….we read the story leading to Jesus’ crucifixion and she loves opening resurrection eggs and telling me the story back; we color eggs and play hide and seek with them; and have a lovely easter dinner after church service; we have breakfast for dinner and game night once a week.
I love traditions. We have holiday traditions as well. The pj’s for Christmas Eve and a fancy holiday meal that evening after our churches candlelight service. We leave notes for Santa and read the Christmas Story (in fact when they were little we acted it out). What a fun! The older I get the more I realize how important traditions are…especially the family pictures. Yearly camping trips are some of the best family traditions and are a great distraction from the world of technology. I will continue our traditions and hope my children will pass them down to the next generation.