I know, I know, conjures up visions of Tevye playing his violin in “Fiddler on the Roof” right? That’s sort of what I mean but not really. I’ve always been a sucker for tradition. It’s one of the things that I have always believed grounds me. It’s also something that has left me with many, many wonderful childhood memories. In my family, it was a tradition to go to our friend’s cottage in Northern Michigan every November to bare witness to the changing of the colors. We’d get out in the forest with the gimungous trees and try to find the biggest, reddist leaves we could get our hands on and then press them between wax paper and keep them to show them off at school the next week. We always had a tradition of going ice skating on one of the local lakes right around Christmas and I can still feel the heat of hot chocolate drunk out of a thermos running down my throat and warming me all the way down to my toes.
Now that I have my own family, I spend time thinking about what my children will remember as the traditions from their childhood. I’m sure some of our traditions we’ve already started unknowingly. But around the holidays we’ve decided to be a bit more overt. We did some ice skating at Seattle Center which was loads of fun.
We spent Christmas Eve lunch at the Space Needle and spent Christmas day with our friends who have what they call, “the Christmas for misfit religions” (basically because no one other than them are actually ChristiansJ) For the second year in a row we road tripped down to the Olympic Rain Forest and stayed in the Lake Quinault Lodge. The lodge was made famous by Roosevelt who was so inspired when he visited he decided to create the Olympic National Park service. Pretty awesome! This time we took friends which was double the trouble, double the fun. The kids are already talking about going next year.
It feels like we have a pretty solid platform to build on. But one thing dawned on me as we were deliberately creating our traditions and memories. The traditions can be as simple as Friday night movie night or a family walk by the lake on Sunday mornings. It’s really capturing the moments again and again, those are the things our children will remember.
Posted on January 3rd, 2008 by Sam
Filed under: Uncategorized
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