The Book of New Family Traditions (22 page)

galore, and lots of shells and stones placed carefully along the edges to embellish it. Then they take lots of photos of their work. They try to outdo themselves each year, and sometimes, this is the image on their Christmas card. There can be many parting rituals for leaving a special vacation spot, such as enjoying a special feast, flying kites, blowing balloons, and taking group photos.

Arriving in Style

Some families vacation at the same cabin, resort, or campground every year, and they love to settle in with a ritual that makes them feel at home and ready to relax. They might head to a nearby stream, take off their shoes, and go wading, or might stop by the same fried-clam stand for their favorite vacation chow. When we visit my husband’s cousin on a lake in New Hampshire every August, we always watch the sun set while sitting on the dock and sipping a special lemon drink. But you can also start an arrival ritual that works wherever you go. If you arrive after dark, for example, you can give the kids glowing florescent sticks and let them run wildly in circles around your cottage or campsite.

Garden Rituals

Gardening and kids definitely go together, and there is much ritual inherent in growing things. Planting something by themselves and then having it grow is a very powerful experience for children, giving them a sense of real accomplishment. This isn’t just a drawing or structure of blocks, but life that they created.

Plant Early and Often

Marcela Villagran’s kids start by planting seeds in little pots in February, giving them a tiny bit of water daily. The kids also help take the kitchen garbage out to the compost pile. At nearly five, Marcela’s daughter said to her: “So whatever we put in the kitchen bowl, the worms eat and then we have this nice soft dirt? And the plants like it, and that’s why they grow so pretty?” Yep, she gets it.

Personalized Scarecrow

Erica Rawson’s family had a gardening routine that included making a scarecrow every year. “We create someone new, give him/her a name, make up a story about them, and refer to the scarecrow often during the summer. The kids love this!”

Resources for Little Green Thumbs

Good bets for small children are sunflowers and nasturtiums, which have big seeds. For vegetables, best bets are lettuce, tomatoes, and pumpkins.

A fantastic website is KidsGarden
ing.org
, produced by the National Gardening Association. A great book for young gardeners is
Roots, Shoots, Buckets, and Boots
by Sharon Love-joy: It includes twelve clever themed gardens for kids, such as a Pizza Patch and a Moon Garden (full of night-blooming flowers).

For another fun idea, see Amanda Soule’s “Birthday Gardens” in the Birthday section, earlier in this book.

Family Reunions

According to Edith Wagner, editor of Reunions magazine, more than 200,000 families in this country celebrate family reunions annually, averaging fifty people each. A regular reunion, even a small one, helps kids grow up with a sense of family history and a feeling of belonging. With extended families so far-flung today, such gifts are even more valuable. Here are some fun reunion ideas shared by families:

Big Event

The Love family reunion, begun in 1976 as a weekend get-together, now attracts 300 family members and lasts four days. The semiannual reunions always include a golf tournament and talent night, but a special feature is the family mentoring program. Every child between seven and fifteen is paired with a family mentor. Even between reunions, the children check in with their mentors about their career aspirations, listing five steps they’ll take to achieve them.

One Generation Is Enough.

Every year, Amy Cordell has a weekend reunion with her five sisters (and one brother), and they call it the Sisters Convention. They meet at a hotel or one of the sibling’s homes and the main activity is talk. “Because the gap between youngest and oldest is twelve years, this has finally made it possible for us to really know each other,” says Amy. They have been known to make reunion T-shirts, but usually each one brings a favorite book or product (hair mousse, once) to share with the others.

Two Generations Are Great, Too

When I was a little girl, I know my parents used to take us to some pretty large Cox family reunions. Alas, all I remember from these is faded black-and-white photos showing us children in summer outfits, sitting on the laps of relatives who are now unknown to me. Because the tradition didn’t stay alive long enough for me to remember it—and given my patchwork family with four very different kids going completely different directions—it didn’t look like we’d ever do the reunion thing.

I don’t see much of my adopted brother since my parents are both gone, but something funny happened recently, thanks to Facebook. My brother’s sons are now in their teens, and one of his twins reached out to me and my sister via Facebook, wanting to get to know us. Next thing you know, we were planning a sibling reunion on the North Carolina coast, in the town where our parents last lived. We did a low-key three-day weekend, all staying at the same motel and mostly eating meals out. We went to the dock where my mother’s ashes were scattered and the golf course where we scattered my father’s ashes, and scattered rose petals in their memory. Best of all was the night where we gathered in my sister’s room and the siblings spun stories of some of the wilder parts of our childhood and our parents’ lives: It was great to see the teenagers silent and rapt, taking in their family history. I also brought copies of some letters written during the Civil War by an ancestor of ours. And we’re planning to do this now every other year. Yes! (Thanks, Stephen!)

Cousins Camp

One form of reunion is when Grandma invites all the grandchildren to visit her at the same time, for a weekend or longer. Because she misses many of her grandkids’ birthdays throughout the year, every summer Patty Mac Hewitt celebrates “Everybody’s Birthday” at her summer house on a lake in New Hampshire. There is plenty of cake and ice cream for all the kids, and everybody gets a present, usually a toy good for either gender that can be left at Grandma’s till next year.

Family Farm

Seidemanns come from twenty-four states on the third Sunday of July for a one-day reunion of this clan at the patriarch’s Wisconsin farm. The descendants of German immigrants always have a kuchen (coffee cake) contest, and the entries are auctioned off to help pay for the reunion. Annual features include food, games, and a talent show, and the barn is full of family furniture and artifacts from eight generations.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

The McNair-Brazil-Scott family traces its origins back to the 1800s, when two brothers named McNair left Mississippi for free land in Arkansas. They’ve been having reunions for many years, and they know how to leverage their large reunion for freebies. Many convention hotels will throw in a free room to a group renting a large block of rooms, but one year, the reunion chairman, who worked in Milwaukee, got the Coca-Cola company to pay for the reunion banquet and give free Cokes to the 250 family members who attended that year. The reunion organizers are also savvy in their fund-raising, and every year, they give scholarship money to all the McNair-Brazil-Scott kids who are graduating from high school. Because they got the reunion organization declared a nonprofit, they can deduct the scholarships. Check out the family website,
www.mbsfamily.org
.

Family Alphabet Chant

Create a family cheer or song in which each letter of the family’s name stands for something. Try to weave family history into it, letting the letters stand for a special hometown, professions of prominent family members, or family lore such as war heroism. Repeat it at every reunion.

Family Olympics

The Bode family picks a special theme for each reunion. The Olympics was one of the most popular, kicking off with a parade in which each family represented a different country. The games were things like “chugging contests” with Dixie cups full of root beer, and the day ended with an international buffet (Swedish meatballs, German potato salad, and so on) and a medals ceremony.

Family Circles

Linda Grenis belongs to a family that has an annual picnic, and an annual business meeting. Her extended family meets in a structured gathering called a family circle, an old-fashioned tradition especially popular with Jewish families but essentially nonreligious. Her family circle is called “The Weber Family Circle Bagel and Lox Hunting Club” as a joke, she says, because “Jewish people typically don’t hunt.” In some family circles, you have to be twenty-one: In this one, you join when you graduate from college. After eating typical Jewish fare, the forty to fifty people sit in a circle and read minutes from the previous meeting, then go around doing what they call “good and welfare,” updating relatives on their lives. There are lots of repeated jokes. (You can get the flavor by checking out the website,
webercousins.com
, which states in the About Us page: “Begun in the Eisenhower era by a small group of (mostly chain-smoking) Webers, who thirsted for companionship and hungered for smoked fish, the Club has a long & illegibly written history. . . . ”) Linda says there are five generations of cousins attending, and that after a recent “membership drive,” the family circle is expanding again.

Great Reunion Resource

Reunions magazine is a bimonthly publication that is packed with ideas for organizing and running successful reunions of all kinds. A subscription for a year is only $10 and comes with a reunion-planning workbook. But an enormous amount of excellent information is also provided free on the magazine’s website,
ReunionsMag.com
. There are lengthy lists of ideas for overall themes, ice-breaker activities, fund-raising possibilities, and tips on choosing a place. Even without subscribing to Reunions (and you can get a trial issue free), users of the website can bid here on discount hotel rooms, via ReunionsMag .
hotelplanner.com
.

Reunion Quilt

The Gines family takes turn hosting their reunion, and each year the host family passes out fabric already cut into six-inch squares. Each family unit attending decorates their fabric (with fabric paint if they don’t sew), and the seamstresses in the clan stage a sort of quilting bee during the get-together. The finished quilt is given to the family that hosted that year.

Family Cookbook

Many families that hold reunions regularly sell items like coffee mugs and T-shirts. If it’s a big reunion, this can be a good moneymaker, and even if it’s a smaller group, at least everyone gets a neat souvenir and there is some money for postage and other reunion expenses. A number of families sell reunion cookbooks, thick with favorite family recipes. With reunions that attract 300 or more guests, this, too, can help raise funds. But it doesn’t have to be ambitious: Ask every family coming to your next reunion to bring five or ten favorite recipes, then publish the resulting “cookbook” on your home computer in time for Christmas.

Memorial Service

Many families like to include a memorial service to honor both departed individuals and the family’s collective history. The Bullock family reunion, inspired in part by Alex Haley’s book Roots, features an especially dramatic candle-lighting ritual during its Saturday night banquet. The lights are turned low, gospel music plays in the background, and candles are lit: a thick white one for the patriarch, George Bullock Sr., and smaller white ones for his departed children.