Traditions...

With the arrival of December comes a flurry of traditions in our house...tonnes of things for us to look forward to. A lot of them seem to revolve around food though. We have the traditional decorating of the gingerbread house. Dad's homemade pizza on Christmas Eve along with my Taco Dip while we watch movies. Lately the movie has been "Touched by an Angel's Christmas show" but, I think next year it will be "The Nativity", once it is on DVD. Christmas Eve also finds us opening one small gift and Big B and I getting to open our stockings from each other and stuffing the kids' stockings until the wee hours of the morning and playing board games with the older kids.

My most special tradition, just for me, is getting a box of Lowry's chocolate covered cherries, sitting somewhere quietly by myself and enjoying a sweet chocolate while I think of my dear GrandpaK. He always had these chocolates and it is a special moment I treasure in order to remember a special man in my life.

I want to make sure that we have special traditions in our household that will make our kids look back on them and smile or want to share them with their kids.

Growing up on the farm, we would go out as a family to find our Christmas tree and every year we were followed by the dog, the cats and the horses throughout the pasture while we searched for the perfect tree. We also went on horse drawn sleigh rides in my uncle's pasture and found new and inventive ways to push each other off the sleigh. In order to warm up we would have a weiner roast in the bushes; after Uncle married his wife, he move our warm up sessions to their house and had warm, toasty pizza buns.

I look back on those times with so much fondness and it makes me realize how special it was to grow up with the family I had. Traditions are more than just doing the same things every year; they are about building memories and a happy place for our children to look back on when they are older.

This post idea courtesy of Mama Says Ohm.