[Bloganuary] Traditions

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Write about a few of your favourite family traditions.

We’ve got a wonderful diversity of family traditions. This by virtue, perhaps, of us being a three-parent family, and so bringing 50% more different traditions and 100% less decisiveness over which to accept than a traditional two-parent family. Or it might reflect our outlook and willingness to evaluate and try new things: to experiment and adopt what works. Or perhaps we just like to be just-barely on this side of the line across the the quirky/eccentric scale1.

Posed sepia photograph of Dan, JTA, Ruth, and their children and dog, dressed in Victorian-era clothing, by a Christmas tree.
Having family photos taken in the style and dress of the Victorian era might be becoming a family tradition: this hangs proudly in our living room in the space formerly occupied by its similar predecessor from some years ago.

But there are plenty of other traditions we’ve inherited or created, such as:

  • Pancake Brunch Sundays sort-of evolved out of a fried Sunday breakfast that used to be a household tradition many years ago. If you come visit us for a weekend you’ll find you’re served pancakes (or possibly waffles) with a mixture of traditional toppings plus, usually, a weekly “feature flavour” around midday on Sunday. For no reason now other than it’s just what we do.
A boy in blue-and-brown striped pyjamas, on a table stacked with plates of waffles, slices into a birthday cake with six candles.
Sunday Brunch stops for nothing, not even birthdays.
  • Family Day is an annual event, marked on or near 3 July each year, with gifts for children and possibly an outing or trip away for everybody to enjoy. It celebrates the fact that we get to be a family together, despite forces outside of our control trying to conspire to prevent it.2
  • Family Film Night takes place most months: in rotation, the five of us take turns to nominate a film or two that we’ll all watch together along with snacks and sweet treats. It might be seen as a continuation of the pre-children tradition of Troma Night from back in the day, except that we don’t go out of our way to deliberately watch terrible films: now that happens just as a result of good or bad fortune! We also periodically schedule a Family Board Games Night, and a Family Videogames Night.
Family members read books in a living room, seen over the top of the pages of an (out of focus) book in the foreground.
Books! Books books books! BOOKS!
  • Christmas Eve Books: a tradition we stole from Iceland is that we give books on Christmas Eve. Adults in our household now don’t really get Christmas gifts, but everybody present is encouraged to exchange books on Christmas eve and then sit up late reading together, often with gingerbread, chocolate, and/or a pan of mulled wine keeping warm on the stove. I find it a fun way to keep my reading list stocked early in the year, plus it encourages the kids to read3
  • Festive meals, while I’m thinking about that end of the year, are pretty-well established. Christmas Eve is all about roast duck pancakes. Christmas Day sees me roast a goose. New Years’ Eve is for fondue. Plus vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) alternatives to the otherwise-unsuitable things, of course.

I’m certain there must be more, but the thing with family traditions is they become part of the everyday tapestry of your life after a while. Eventually traditions become hard to see them because they’re always there. I’m sure there are more “everyday rituals” that we’ve taken on that are noteworthy or interesting to outsiders but which to us are so mundane as to be unworthy of mention!

But every single one of these is something special to us. They’re an element of structure for the kids and a signifier of community to all of us. They’re routines that we’ve taken on and made “ours” as part of our collective identity as a family. And that’s just great.

Footnotes

1 Determining which side of the line I mean is left as an exercise to the reader.

2 It’s been what…? 6½ years…? And I’m still not ready even emotionally to blog about the challenges we faced, so maybe I never will. So if you missed that chapter of our lives, suffice to say: for a while, it looked like we might not get to continue being a family, and over the course of one exceptionally-difficult year it took incredible effort, resolve, sleepless nights, supportive families, and (when it came down to brass tacks) enough money and lawyers to seek justice… in order to ensure that we got to continue to be. About which we’re all amazingly grateful, and so we celebrate it.

3 Not that they need any help with that, little bookworms that they are.

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