Holiday traditions tend to bring families together

    Family traditions are something that everyone looks forward to, especially during the holiday season. With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming quickly around the corner, going home for the holidays is one of the particular joys that most people experience during this season.
    Traditions are one of the unique traits that bring a family together. Recalling our childhood, we can all remember our favorite – and not so favorite – traditions.
    Typically, the traditions are associated with a meal since that’s the usual opportunity for family gatherings. I believe that gathering around a holiday meal can certainly be part of the family tradition, but the shared activities that take place surrounding the meal are what make each family’s traditions unique.
    While the meals and conversation may all run together holiday after holiday, the shared activities are what create lasting memories – those activities are what we look back on with fondness.
Establishing new traditions
    This year, I have been looking forward to the holidays, first, because I have been able to decorate my own home. I’ve always enjoyed coming home for college breaks and seeing the way my parents had decorated. The first thing I usually do when I return home is to look around the house and spot the “new” things that have appeared for decoration.
    This year, I was excited to begin looking for fall and Christmas decorations, picking up little things along the way in anticipation of the upcoming season. Of course, once I decorated, I sent pictures to my family, hoping to let them see the beginnings of my traditions.
    As Halloween drew closer, my husband and I talked about the traditions that our families had growing up, and which traditions we wanted to keep going. Halloween was never a huge holiday for my family, but in some families, like my husband’s, it was a huge event. This year, as we sat outside carving pumpkins in preparation for the children in the neighborhood to come to our door for candy, I felt, for the first time, the importance of creating new traditions and upholding the traditions that both of our families had started.
    Of course, Halloween is not as big as Thanksgiving or Christmas, so we’ve already begun sharing family traditions and deciding which traditions will be the best for our small lifestyles.
A look ahead to Christmas
    One of my favorite family traditions starts the day after Thanksgiving. In my family, my dad will bring down our Christmas tree from the attic and all of the Christmas decorations to begin decorating for Christmas. As my mom and I hand out the ornaments, my brother, sister and dad decorate the tree, and then we all decorate the entire house, saving the Nativity for last.
    My parents use an extremely old and fragile Nativity set that was handmade and painted by my mother’s grandmother and given to my parents as a wedding present. Placing all of the figures in the crèche in front of our large window in the dining room, we hide the infant Jesus and place him in his crib on Christmas day.
    Unfortunately, I’ll miss out on my family’s traditions this year since I’m unable to come home for Thanksgiving, only visiting home the week before Christmas.
    As I was becoming upset about celebrating the holidays by ourselves this year, my husband continued to remind me that since it’s our first holiday together, we’ll have to make new traditions, incorporating both of our family traditions together to create new memories. Going off of our first Halloween, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be cultivating new traditions that root from both our pasts.
    As young adults growing up in a technological age, traditions may seem commonplace, boring, or “old.” However, one of the best things about cultivating family traditions is that they bring families closer together. As we think about our own traditions, an important aspect is thinking about the memories shared among each other.
    Even though everyone disagrees with family members at some points in life, looking back over family traditions helps us realize just how strong our families are. As young adults, we must remember as we begin our own lives and take responsibility for our futures, the importance of tradition, and have the impetus to implement traditions within our own lives.
    Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at hbozantwitcher@clarionherald.org.