Holiday Traditions: Part 1

Apparently becoming a mother as not only instilled in me a more sensitive ear, crazy thought reading abilities & finding the use of my mouth to hold & open things to be about as useful as an additional appendage….but I have been completely overwhelmed with the necessity to start “family holiday traditions”. Move over nesting, you never even came close to this.

I have been blessed to have come from a family that loved to celebrate. Every holiday is a celebration, a chance to see famiy, eat good food and just to purely enjoy what God has graced us with. Resulting in my necessary 3 month long celebration; when Halloween, Thanksgiving & Christmas all seem to jumble together.

I also came from a “broken” family. Though I really dislike the term “broken” because we’re all crazy, you can’t fix us, we don't want you to fix us and if anyone tried it would cost an exorbitant amount of cash...to be paid to us. But because of this I celebrated many holidays at least twice. Which really only adds fuel to this fire, because I’ve got lots of places to pull traditions from.

The one thing I enjoy about creating holiday traditions for my own family, is I can keep the traditions I know & love, forget all about the ones I really didn’t care for and implement some of my own! I also enjoy the opportunity to coordinate with my husband. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve asked him about HIS family traditions and any he’d like to implement in our family. Parenthood, in general, is a cooperative team sport….but for some reason to bring two sets of traditions together makes it feel even MORE like we are joining two families. If there are two things I love it’s holidays & family. (And who’s kidding who, all the food too!)

For Thanksgiving I put out some card stock and pens, crayons & markers. I also printed out some blank leaves which I cut out and put with the supplies. I traced G’s hand print and made a hand-print turkey; in the middle of which I put the things she’s thankful for. (Being that she’s 8 months old, I took a wild guess with 'Mommy, Daddy, Puffs & Milk')

Then adults were asked to write what they were thankful for on the leaves, and the children had a choice of making their own hand-print turkey or using a leaf.

As the day progressed not only did everyone get into writing what they were thankful for & decorating their leaves & turkeys…my aunt & I decided it would be fun to let people read them aloud. So we randomly put the leaves or turkeys down in front of plates around the table. (Or not so randomly in some cases, we thought it would be all too funny for my uncle to read about being hopeful of getting along with future college roommates) And as we started to pass food around the table we all took turns reading what others were thankful for. Much to my surprise, everyone seemed to be “into” it and enjoyed it. Hopefully this is something that we will continue to do.

It was my original intention to just trace G’s handprint & write in the things she's thankful for, every year. (And of course do the same for any subsequent children's hand prints) Then some how make some decorative chain/garland with them. But since as of right now, I only have one hand print, I don’t have to completely finish this thought process yet. However, after seeing how much everyone seemed to enjoy the leaves & turkeys, I may find a way to include those. Ten years from now it'd be nice to look back to see who was around for Thanksgiving that year, and what they were thankful for. So for now, I'll just hold onto the pieces until I have another jolt of creativity. 

Stayed tuned for a Part 2 where I share current Christmas traditions and what my plans for new traditions.