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CREATING HOLIDAY TRADITIONS
By DEBBIE PETERSON

In the hustle and bustle of shopping, cooking, traveling, decorating, and all the rest of the preparations that must be done to prepare for the holidays, December can go by in a blur of activity. How can families reduce the stress of this time of year and enjoy more family time? The answer is to focus on family traditions.

Making time for traditions helps a family prioritize the most important activities and eliminate the unnecessary ones, resulting in less stress and more meaningful time together. Traditions bond family members closer together and allow one generation to pass down values, beliefs, and culture to the next. And best of all, traditions are a lot of fun and create great memories.

The ones that are most affected by traditions are children. “Children love rituals,” says Martin V. Cohen, Ph.D., in an article on www.FamilyLife.com. “Children find a certain security and solace in something that gives a sense of belonging and comfort.”

Take some time early in December to plan family traditions. Involve every member of the family and ask what activities he or she especially enjoys and has good memories of doing in the past. As a family changes, such as children growing older or new members added, traditions may need to change as well. Here are some traditions local families enjoy that might spark some new ideas for you to try with your family.

DECORATING

Carole Jolly, Senior Account Executive for AbouTown Press says decorating is one of her favorite family traditions. “Each year we all get together and put up the tree and decorate the house. If one of us can’t be there, we wait.” She also loves to enjoy other people’s Christmas decorations, saying that she likes to “grab my boys, put our sweats on, get hot chocolate and pile in the car and go look at lights. We spend several hours going through Bryan and College Station looking at the parks and neighborhoods admiring all the beautiful lights and decorations.

Longtime Bryan teacher Gaye Kay has a special memory of a decoration in her family. She shared, “my family has always used an old Celluloid donkey that belonged to my dad to put in our Christmas tree. Dad had had this donkey ever since he was a little boy. It was a very dear custom to put this donkey in the tree in a very special place so it could be seen by all. Every grandchild was told the story of the donkey and that it used to belong to Papaw.”

COUNTDOWN

Children enjoy counting down the days until the holidays. Bryan Mom Jenny Adams said that she makes a countdown calendar. “I put the number of days until Christmas on the front, and I write the special events of the day on the back: last day of school, church party, dinner out---things like that. The kids take turns pulling one piece of paper down every morning.”

Adams has another tradition that helps gets her kids from the last day of school to Christmas. “I make little slips of paper with fun holiday activities on them and put them in a basket. I make some of them food related, like have a piece of holiday candy, others kindness related, like write a card for someone. Some are creative, like draw a picture or make an ornament. Some are music or TV related, like watch a Christmas video, sing a carol. Other stuff is just to keep us busy like find a new Christmas game online, help with a chore, make a popcorn chain, etc. The more creative the better!”

Tammy Dowell, mother of eight, has another tradition that keeps kids busy over the holidays. “We would always buy a special puzzle for the holidays. We would set up the card table and leave it out and work on it as time allowed over our holiday break. Sometimes all of us would work at the same time. It was so fun to work on something together and see it take shape until we completed it. I have begun doing this with my family and my kids love it.”

FOOD

Food is an important part of many family traditions. It can be a special treat, like the cinnamon rolls my mother always made for our Christmas breakfast, or the sugar cookies and gingerbread men I like to decorate with my kids.

Chris Peterson, AbouTown Press publisher, enjoys the tradition his family had of serving a Christmas Eve dinner made up of many different kinds of appetizers and light foods. Peterson is part Swedish, so he thinks of it as a kind of smorgasbord with cold cut meats, little breads and crackers, smoked salmon, and cheeses, and now he carries that tradition on with his own family before they head out to a Christmas Eve church service.

PRESENTS

Even the way your family opens presents can be according to your own special traditions. AbouTown Press Publisher Rodney Walline says “On my mother’s side of the family, we open gifts the night of Christmas Day after a big family dinner, readings from the Bible about the birth of Jesus by whoever is the head of that household, and a family prayer where anyone is encouraged to add to the prayer. Then we assign a ‘Santa’ who delivers one gift at a time allowing others to enjoy the gifts everyone gets. We also assign one ‘Elf’ to manage the trash wrappings. My own family has established an additional tradition of opening one gift late Christmas Eve after a reading of the Christmas story... the one with Rudolf.”

GIVING BACK

There are many ways families can give back together during the holiday season and make it a tradition. College Station Mom Jorja Kimball remembers “When I was young my mother would always make a point of stopping to put money in the Salvation Army bell ringers tin and tell us how helpful they had been when her brothers were in the war and overseas in the military. She was one of eight kids, and two brothers served in the military. So I told this story to my daughter and she now volunteers to be a bell ringer for the Salvation Army. We do it together to honor both my mom and her brothers. And of course we can’t go by the bell ringers without dropping something in. Once you have stood for 3-4 hours in the freezing cold as a bell ringer, you just can’t pass one by!”

RELIGIOUS

Peterson says one of his favorite traditions is a family advent wreath. For the four Sundays leading up to Christmas and on Christmas Eve, his family lights one more candle on the wreath and reads Bible verses that tell a part of the story of Christmas. “It helps us to focus on the meaning of Christmas for our family. It’s a way to tell the Christmas story to our kids in a visual way and reinforces what we do at church at home. The kids really look forward to it every year.”

Whatever your family does this year for the holidays, take time out from the hustle and bustle for those special family traditions and maybe even think about adding something new.