‘Tis the season! (Wait! Don’t stop reading!) Holidays are upon us! From the moment Halloween candy shows up in the aisles of stores, we are bombarded with holiday decorations, candies, and gifts from now until Valentine’s Day! It can get overwhelming and distracting. Before things get any crazier, I hope you’ll take just a moment or two and consider how you/your kids/your significant other would answer the follow question:
{These could be related to Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/New Year’s/6 de Enero/Valentine’s Day}
If you can easily answer for yourself, do your children have the same answers? Family traditions are one of the biggest ways to build unity within a family. Unity is what we all want. Unity is what binds individuals together into a cohesive family unit, reducing bickering, and strengthening relationships. Every family who wants to be successful wants to build unity. An excellent way to build unity is with family traditions.
The easiest and most memorable way to build family traditions is through meaningful holidays. Obviously if you do not celebrate Christmas, you don’t necessarily need a Christmas family tradition. If you don’t celebrate Hanukkah, you don’t need a Hanukkah family tradition. You get the idea. But for the holidays you do celebrate, traditions make those holidays much more special. And as an added bonus, traditions make holiday planning easier as well because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each year, you just maintain traditions and let other things fall into place (or away) around them. Since I am not writing an entire book about traditions today, I am only going to focus on two major holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) just to get the wheels turning. I would LOVE it if you’d share your favorite family traditions in the comments below this post.
At our house, when our kids were really little they always wanted to wear their Halloween costumes day after day and would even beg to sleep in them. We started the tradition that on Halloween night, they could sleep in their costumes if they wanted to. They looked forward to that each year and would even remind me as they weeks approached.
Maybe you have a tradition at Thanksgiving where everyone goes around the table and says what they are thankful for a few times. Great! Years from now, your children will look back at these with fond memories. Keep doing it!
Looking for some Thanksgiving traditions?
-instead of a tablecloth on the Thanksgiving table, cover the table with butcher paper and have everyone write what they are thankful for on the paper. This can be done a day or two in advance if you want or you have it set up for guests to write on while they are waiting for the feast to begin. **Just don’t get too upset when someone spills a drink and ruins it. It is an inevitable part of a family meal, isn’t it?
-perform some sort of service as a family. Maybe you all go to a homeless shelter and help serve food or maybe you take a Thanksgiving feast to a family in need or maybe you rake leaves for an elderly or disabled person. The service doesn’t always have to be the same, but the tradition of doing some sort of service together as a family is an excellent tradition that will strengthen your family in so many ways.
-watch a parade or a dog show or a football game or a movie together. Decide what you think interests your family the most and stick with it. Say, “We watch _________ every Thanksgiving as a family.”
-make a treat together. This could be a dish that you will eat as part of your Thanksgiving feast or maybe it is something you will give to your neighbors or friends or to people in need, but the tradition will be that you make this treat together each year.
-find a decoration like a big jar or a cornucopia that you can fill. Throughout the month of November, every member of the family writes down things they are thankful for (small kids could draw pictures or dictate to an adult) and adds them to the empty decoration. On Thanksgiving day, or maybe that night after your feast and before bed, you could pull them all out and read them out loud as a family.
Looking for some Christmas traditions?
-drive around town and look at Christmas lights. This does not have to be a big, grand outing. Just do it! Christmas lights can be so magical! The real magic, though, is in the tradition. Make this a tradition to go out and look at Christmas lights every year and even though some years with young kids might not be the most fun, our brains will take a cumulative memory of these and the good times will overpower the bad.
-decorate together. Trust me: I know this is hard. You don’t have to do ALL of the decorating together, but making this a family tradition will strengthen family bonds, remind you to teach your children the history of some of your old family heirloom decorations, and teach your children how to decorate for a holiday. You don’t want to send your kids off into the world someday without teaching them something so basic and yet important as how to decorate for a holiday, do you? Yes, it means it will take longer, but it will be worth it. I am grateful for a patient mother who did this for my siblings and me. When I became a mother and asked her how on earth she managed to decorate with four young kids and carry on all of our family traditions, she wisely said, “I let go of perfection.” I am so glad she did!
-help children buy gifts for other family members. Take one child at a time into a store (it could be a Dollar Store or a toy store, that detail doesn’t matter or have to stay the same each year) and let them choose gifts for their sibling(s) and other parent. They could also buy for grandparents/cousins/aunts/uncles/friends/teachers if you want to include that in this trip, but remember that this may be a bigger challenge for a 4-year-old than it will be later for a 14-year-old (or vise-versa, depending on the child and the direction of the wind that day…). Don’t make it too complicated. The focus here should be on thinking of giving to others. Taking this time each year to think of our other family members’ wants and needs instead of our own is an excellent way to build a strong tradition that leads to a stronger family unit. You can decide if you want to have your children work for the money they will spend or if they simply receive a certain amount or an unlimited amount–that is up to you, but you should probably decide far enough in advance.
-take a family photo. Family photos are an exhausting and not very enjoyable experience in our current family situation. Making this a tradition at least takes the fight out of it. Everybody knows that we will be taking a family photo during this season. There is no point in asking why, because it has become just something that we do each year. Even though it is rough, I treasure those family photos and love to see how our children have grown through the years.
-do service! A tradition of service is always an excellent idea for a family tradition. These traditions are so strengthening and are so memorable to all involved, especially those performing the service. You can think of a particular service you want your family to be involved with each year or you can decided that your tradition is service and allow flexibility in what that service may be from year to year. Just commit!
-want to know what has become one of my favorite Christmas traditions? It’s silly, but so fun. My husband and I stopped buying each other stocking gifts a few years ago when money was super tight. Instead, we secretly gathered the most random stuff we could find around the house and stuffed it into the other person’s stocking. On Christmas, we had the funnest time laughing at the object we each pulled out of our stockings. We’ve done it every year since and every year it gets funnier. For example, one year I got one of our niece’s shoes, fish oil vitamins, a can of tuna fish, a sock, some candies, a tire pressure gauge, and junk mail. We are usually so tired on Christmas morning anyway that we are crying laughing at the random stuff we pull out. It’s been far more fun than I’d ever expected, plus less work than shopping for the “perfect” things to go in the stocking, and much less expensive, since we do not buy a single thing that goes inside!
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If you’ve noticed a pattern here, it is the idea of commitment. Commit to your family’s traditions. Maybe commitment is the only takeaway from a particular tradition, but if you have taught the importance of commitment, you have taught a beautiful character-building skill already! I hope I haven’t sent you into a panic with all of this talk about upcoming holidays. Please don’t feel as though you have to create 1000 new family traditions in order to be a good, successful parent. NO! That is not the message here! Simply choose a few do-able traditions (they are probably things you are already doing) and commit to repeating them every year. Try to get input from your other family members. What they say may surprise you. By deciding it’s a family tradition, you will commit to doing this activity together each year, regardless of busy schedules. These are the things memories are made from. I hope those unity-building traditions bring joy to you and your family year in and year out.
I know I’ve only scratched the surface. What are your favorite holiday traditions? Share some below in the comments.
For Halloween in the past we’ve had a pumpkin carving party with friends but the last two years have just been too busy with little friends birthday parties and such so we’ve just made the pumpkin carving party smaller with just the family! Hopefully one day we can return to our bigger parties that were always so much fun!!
For Thanksgiving, my mom and I search the best deals while watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade with the family. We do Black Friday shopping together. My brother usually joins us on Friday for our Thanksgiving dinner since he has other family that he eats with on Thanksgiving day and it all works out well.
For Christmas, we each decorate a new ornament for the tree. This tradition we started when we started having kids because I always appreciated the ornaments I had from when I was a child, (which are hung on my tree today). I usually buy ornaments we can paint or color on clearance the year before so I have them on hand for the new year and they’re super cheap!!
I know there are other things we do but its an example for each holiday! Thanks for some new ideas!
Thanks, Hilary! I hope y’all get to do your bigger pumpkin carving parties again, too! But I’m glad you’re still keeping the tradition alive.
Every year, a week or so before Christmas, I have my nieces come over and we watch Arthur Christmas on a big projection screen out by the pool. They wear their Christmas PJs and I put out an air mattress with big blankets. We have hot chocolate and snacks. It’s great! Plus, it gives my brother and sister in law a free night to do last minute shopping and wrap gifts with no little ones around. 😀
YES! I have no doubt everyone involved LOVES this tradition, Kody! Great idea–so glad you shared it!