The Book of New Family Traditions (29 page)

Toast the New Year

Use plastic wine or champagne glasses but serve sparkling water or cider to the kids. All family members get to make a toast, saying one thing they hope happens in the new year to himself or herself, the family, or the wider world. End with a shared family toast “To the (Name) Family!”

Celebrate with a Burst

It’s an ancient tradition to open the doors (and sometimes windows) to let the New Year and good luck into your home. It’s also a tradition to make lots of noise, so get wooden spoons and bang on pots, pound drums, and ring any bells you have. Make a tissue paper banner to tape across the opening to the family room, and at midnight (on your family’s clock), burst through the paper, holding hands.

Balloon Treasure Frenzy

In Texas, the Minich family loves to make noise by bursting balloons, but the balloons are also full of “treasure,” a good omen for a prosperous year ahead. Beforehand, the parents purchase about 500 balloons and fill them with a piece of candy or a coin, with a few containing dollar bills. They’re inflated with an inexpensive, handheld balloon pump, then stuffed into a room that has mostly been emptied of furniture. At midnight, the family’s kids and sometimes their friends get the signal to dive in, when their mother tosses in some extra quarters and nickels among the balloons.

Family Unity Day

Perhaps while working on your resolutions, you might also spend some fun time thinking about your family as a tribe or team and brainstorm along those lines:

•
Invent a family song, chant, cheer, rap, or motto.

•
Design, make, and hang a family shield, using symbols from your ethnic heritage, religious traditions, and shared passions.

•
Have everyone finish this sentence: “Members of the (insert last name) family are known for (fill in the blank).” Make the list as long as you can, then vote on the top three or four
choices, which can be serious or silly, or some of both. Actually, if you do this exercise first, you’ll be better prepared for the chant and the shield.

Dinner Day

This has been a declared state holiday in Pennsylvania since 2002. On the second Saturday in January, every family is supposed to invite a neighbor family of slight acquaintance for supper. The man behind the idea is Jeffrey Smith, a Doylestown-based software designer, who came up with the idea after the 9/11 tragedy. The homepage of the
DinnerDay.com
site says: “Invite your neighbor to dinner as a celebration of the values that make America a terrific place to live. Ask a neighbor you’ve never met or one you’ve only waved at, but never taken the time to get to know. Take a moment to break some bread together in one of your homes or out on the town. Either way, be sure to build a bridge to your neighbors and take down any fences that have kept you apart.”

Try this idea yourself, even if you live in a different state or another date works better for you. As Jeffrey Smith told Cooking Light magazine in 2008, “You can change the fabric of your neighborhood, give something special to yourself, your community and the world, just by stopping neighbors in the street and inviting them to dinner.”

January 18: Celebrate the Birthday of A. A. Milne,
Winnie the Pooh
Author

Getting a sense that there is a person who creates the books and characters we love is a great way to make reading special and personal. Kids love knowing that A. A. Milne wrote the books about his real-life son, Christopher Robin, and his stuffed animals. In addition, mid-January is a good time for a party, deep in the winter doldrums. When my son was young, this was probably his favorite thing to celebrate other than Christmas and his birthday,

Setup

Spread a picnic blanket or bedsheet on the floor of the family room or playroom. If there are any stuffed animals in the household from the Hundred Acre Wood (Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, or others), place them on the blanket, along with paper plates or plastic ones from a child’s tea set.

Foods

Because Pooh loves honey, serve honey graham crackers or honey cookies. We have Pooh cookie cutters and a book of Pooh recipes, so we always ate honey cookies in the shapes of Piglet and Tigger and the rest. If blowing out candles is important, use a cupcake. Drinks could be juice or herbal tea with honey.

Activities

Sing “Happy Birthday” to A. A. Milne, then blow out any candles and eat treat foods. Read some of Milne’s work, either the classic books
Winnie the Pooh
and
The House at Pooh Corner
, or his poems “When We Were Very Young” and “Now We Are Six.” There are also some terrific, practical Pooh books from Disney, such as Oh Bother, Someone’s Messy. If someone wrote a book about the stuffed animals in your house, what adventures would they have? Imagine the titles.

Some Other Favorite Authors and Their Birthdays

March 2: Dr. Seuss

How about green eggs and ham for breakfast or dinner?

June 10: Maurice Sendak

Have a Wild Things party!

July 31: J. K. Rowling

This is also the birthday of her best-known character, Harry Potter. Have a magic-themed birthday, and go find a Pumpkin Juice recipe at
Mugglenet.com
. (If you can’t find fresh pumpkin in July, use a can of pumpkin puree.)

Snow Day Rituals

There are two kinds here: rituals to make it snow, and rituals for celebrating at home when school is closed.

Making It Snow

Somehow, this is a trend/superstition that has spread like wildfire, and there are a bunch of variations that kids use all over the country to make it snow overnight. Among them are: wearing your PJs inside out and backward, flushing ice cubes down the toilet one at a time, sleeping with a spoon under your pillow (some say the spoon must go in the freezer first; one family I know uses a potato instead of a spoon). It is widely agreed that there must also be some sort of Snow Day Dance. For tips on that, there are YouTube videos, plus several children’s books about Snow Day Dances.

Snowed-In Rituals

When Max was little, I started baking gingerbread with a light lemon frosting on every snow day, using the wonderful recipe in
The Silver Palate Cookbook
. What’s great about gingerbread is that it is quick and easy to make, plus all that cinnamon and molasses smells so fabulous after you come in the house from sledding and snowman building. If there are a slew of snow days during the winter, we skip the gingerbread baking and enjoy our leftovers.

A Snow Day potluck: One year, after an especially heavy snow that made driving impossible but didn’t shut off the power, our neighbors decided to have a potluck dinner and cook up a big ham they had on hand. People brought what food and drink they had, and we sat around the fireplace and got to know many of our neighbors for the first time. It was magical!

Valentinés Day

Valentine’s Garden of Sweets

Lori Prew’s kids love her Valentine’s Garden. She grabs a small planter, fills it with actual potting soil, then her children “plant” Valentine seeds (those candies called Red Hots). Every day, they water the seeds. On Valentine’s Day, they wake up to a miracle: the seeds have grown to full sized lollipops, which they “harvest.”

Treats Undercover

Pam Skripaksaysthat on Valentine’s Day, family members give each other cards and small gifts. All these items are placed underneath their plates, which are turned upside down. They sit down to eat a special meal, and all of them lift their plates simultaneously to reveal the surprises they hid for each other.

A Valentine for Nature

On this day when you declare your love and affection, make a heart in your backyard or in a local park or on a favorite trail. Shape it out of materials at hand, like pinecones or twigs or rocks. Or bring along biodegradable food like cranberries, so you will also be leaving a treat for local wildlife. Snap a photograph of your heart art before you leave: Turn it into a homemade card for someone you love, or post it on Facebook.

Valentine Tree

Trees are a great centerpiece of ritual action because they grow and change like families do, symbolize life and hope, and can be easily but beautifully decorated for any season or occasion. Every year, the Dodge family buys a small tree in a pot, such as a three-foot-tall pine, and decorates it with a string of tiny white lights. Everyone helps cut out red craft paper to make teddy bears and hearts, pokes a hole in their tops, and uses thin ribbon to tie them onto the tree. The decorations stay on until spring, when the family plants the tree in the yard. If you do this every year, you could designate a special Valentine Grove on your property.

Red Food Night

At the Straw household in Plano, Texas, all the food for Valentine’s dinner is red. Sue Straw serves beets or red cabbage, mashed potatoes mixed with red food coloring, and either ham (pink) or pasta with red sauce. Red fruit might include grapes, raspberries, or strawberries. Even the milk is red. Dessert can be brown, as long as it’s chocolate and shaped like a heart.

Have-a-Heart Awards

Each member of the family gives an award to each other member for a special act of love or kindness. Buy round, fuzzy, ping-pong-ball-size pom-poms at your local craft store, to which you can glue little eyes and mouths and feet. Cut hearts from a piece of construction paper four inches square, and glue the feet to the paper heart. Write on the heart the name of the person getting the award and what they did. Perhaps one child helped a younger sibling learn to tie his shoes. Perhaps Dad earned his award coaching Little League last summer.

The Book of Love

Who wrote the Book of Love? You did. Buy an inexpensive blank book, one with a heart on the cover, or glue one there. Call it The Book of (your last name) Love, and each year, have every member of the family write one loving thing about every other member. Take dictation for young kids. Every year on Valentine’s Day, read what has been written the previous years.

Heartbooks

One of the best traditions I ever invented is the heart-shaped book I made for my son every year on Valentine’s Day. I created a simple heart-shaped template, about six or seven inches long and wide, and cut out ten of them from white computer printer paper. Then, I cut another heart from something stiffer, like card stock, to use for the book’s cover. I decorated the cover with stickers or cartoon characters cut from old calendars or magazine photos, and on top of that, I wrote the words: Ten Things I Love About Max, from Mom. (After the first year, I wrote “Ten More Things I Love About Max.”)

I used a hole puncher to punch holes at the top curves of the hearts, so I could hold all the pages together with a piece of narrow satin ribbon, which was knotted a few times in the back to stay put. This made a nice handle, so I could hang the heartbook on the doorknob to my son’s bedroom while he slept.

To me, what makes a gift like this the most meaningful is to be thoughtful and specific in the text. I wrote things like: “I love that your favorite animals are spiky or extinct,” and “I love that you’re open to new things (sometimes).” The last page is always something like: “I could never fit everything I love about you in one book,” or “Actually, I love
everything
about you!”

From the time he became a teenager, I was forbidden to make a heartbook for my son, but no matter. I have discovered they make great birthday gifts as well: I once made one for a friend’s milestone birthday that was “Sixty Things I Love About Joan.” For that, I used fancier papers, and since I wasn’t going to be hanging it on a doorknob, I used the ribbon differently: I cut two pieces instead of one, and rather than making a handle, I threaded each ribbon through all the holes and tied it into a bow for the top.