The Book of New Family Traditions (39 page)

The Gift of Ourselves

Each family member announces something he or she will do for the family in the coming year. Each person could write the planned gift on a slip of paper, with little ones getting help on that part. One idea is to slip the notes into stockings before the holiday. Read them aloud on Christmas morn. Kids could give the gift of a cheerful attitude about chores or homework. Or a child could offer to fix breakfast on Saturday, or walk the dog, or help carry in groceries. Parents can give the gift of their presence: spending one-on-one time with a kid every day at a certain time, or promising to take a child to the park weekly.

Gift Exchange

One way to limit excess is to pick names out of a hat, so extended family members have to shop for only one person. The Trieschman family of Baltimore picks names on Thanksgiving and adds to the fun by delivering a “joke gift” to the person between that holiday and Christmas. They try to do it anonymously and make it as silly as possible: Cindy Trieschman actually rented a donkey for a day and snuck it into her father’s toolshed. On Christmas, the adults don’t get to open their regular present until they accurately guess who picked their name.

Ornament Tradition

Many families give each child one ornament a year, often on a theme, like all doves or stars or angels. Michele Lynn gives her son an ornament related to something he was passionate about in the past year. One year, she gave him an ornament featuring Santa catching a Frisbee, because her son played on the school’s Ultimate Frisbee team. She keeps all his ornament collection together, with slips of paper saying what year he got each. One day, when he grows up and makes a real home of his own, they will be his to take.

One Gift on Christmas Eve

Many families have a tradition of opening one present on Christmas Eve. In some households, that gift is holiday-themed pajamas: It’s very sweet the next morning, when the kids come tumbling down the stairs dressed in matching jammies! Less common is the tradition Angie Karnoupakis grew up with in California: Her mother gave everyone a squirt gun on Christmas Eve. As she told
Real Simple
magazine in November 2004, “We’d run off to fill our new toys and ambush the rest of the family. I have great memories of us running around after one another and of Grandma hiding behind an open door to get each of us between the eyes as we ran past.”

Gift Idea for Older Stepkids

Marveen Craig was wary of making elaborate new traditions as a stepmom. It wasn’t only that the kids already had established rituals, but that they were grown when she joined the family. She came up with a terrific idea that everyone loves.

“I proposed that instead of giving each other Christmas gifts that might be too big/small, not the right color and all that, we should instead call our tradition Five Days of Christmas,” says Marveen. The plan was for each one to create a special experience for all five, but keep it secret until right before it happened. These are Marveen’s rules:

1.
Each family member chooses an activity they love and then treats the other members to it.

2.
The recipients cannot decline or grumble. After all, it is a gift.

3.
The “gift giving” must take place within two weeks of Christmas.

And here are some of the gifts that were given based on this new tradition: An evening of bowling and dinner at a local steakhouse; front-row seats at a dinner-theater production; center seats on the ice at a pro hockey game; and a “Margarita Run,” which consisted of a fully stocked limo picking everyone up and stopping at three different Mexican restaurants for appetizers. (From the appetizers, they voted on which restaurant they would go back to for dinner and dancing until midnight.)

Ckristmas Quilt: One Square Per Year

When my son was a toddler, his babysitter, Resa Veary, gave me a special gift: about twenty squares of plain, unbleached muslin fabric, nine inches by nine inches. The squares were placed inside a fabric drawstring bag, with two squeeze bottles of fabric paint: one red, one green. Resa said that every Christmas, I could have Max decorate one square, and someday, I would sew them all together into a quilt. What an inspired gift!

When he was very little, we would do simple things like have Max trace around a Pooh cookie cutter. When he learned to write his name, he just wrote his name over and over in red and green to decorate his square. Later, he would draw pictures of his favorite Pokemon or TV character, or a pet, like his leopard geckos, Dart and Chet.

I finally finished the quilt in 2011, after Max turned sixteen and made his fifteenth square. I decided to make the quilt four squares across and four rows down, and for the sixteenth square, on the bottom at the right, I wrote, “Max’s Christmas Quilt” in red and green. This is my favorite type of tradition, because it celebrates the holiday each year but also showcases his growth, providing a snapshot of his passions and abilities year by year.

Most years, it probably took him less than thirty minutes to decorate his square, but cumulatively, this finished quilt amounts to a beautiful memento of his whole childhood. When I quilted it, instead of making lines or squiggles for my quilting pattern, I wrote words in script (using my sewing machine) describing some of our other holiday traditions like “Leaving Cookies for Santa.” Now that it is done, we’ll hang it every year on Christmas, but I’m really thinking about starting a new one as well. Maybe we will all work on squares!

From One Quilt, Many Gifts

Michele Isaacson took an old quilt her grandmother made that was falling to pieces and cut up the top to make heart-and star-shaped ornaments for her father, her siblings, and her kids, embellishing them with buttons she found in her grandmother’s sewing basket.

Important Note to Non-Sewing Households

You can do this, too! Start decorating the squares, and when you have collected enough, contact a local quilt store or fabric shop in your community. They will give you contact information for a local quilter you can hire to stitch the quilt together and do the actual quilting of the top layer with a backing and batting. Better yet: When your kid, or kids, are almost done decorating their squares, sign up for a beginner quilt class, and finish it yourself.

Christmas Charity Traditions

Many families that want to raise compassionate kids have philanthropic traditions during Christmas. And it’s also a solution to the age-old problem of what the grown-ups should give one another when they already have so much.

Family Charity Pick Rather Than Gifts

Members of Emily Sagor’s extended family collect nominations in September or October of charities they would like to help. There are usually five or six nominated, and the person who nominated each gives some details about the organization and why he or she picked it. Before Christmas, they vote on the charity, and each family decides how much to send to her aunt, who bundles the payments and makes one check to the charity in the name of the entire family. Emily says they find it loads more gratifying than picking names and getting token gifts for the holiday. “Each year we end up not only learning about some new organizations that are worthy of our attention, but we also learn a bit more about each other as we learn what matters to each of us.”

Giving Christmas to a Whole Family

Jennifer Grant’s Episcopal church in Chicago allows parishioners to help an entire family. They get a packet with the names, ages, and requests for gifts. “My kids and I go to a big box store and get everything from canned yams to remote controlled cars to CD players to mittens and sheets,” says Jennifer, a mother of four. “We come home, talk about each recipient, pray for each member of the family, wrap and label the gifts, and deliver everything to the church.” What also makes the experience special, she says, is that the heads of household write a little about themselves on the forms, so “my kids get a sense of each person’s story and dignity. They also sense that we’re fortunate and that what we have belongs to God, not us. It makes for a less greedy Christmas and I don’t find my kids begging for stuff around the holiday.”

Local Scholarship from the Vogts

When the four Vogt kids graduated from high school, the family started a tradition in which everyone donates money for a scholarship to be awarded each year to the high school where most of the kids went, to help a needy kid with college costs. It isn’t a vast amount of money, but it is helpful and a vote of confidence for someone who needs both. The guidance counselors help the family pick: Kids apply and write an essay and the family chooses who will receive the award.

Matching Allowance Funds to Make a Difference

For Sandy Graham’s kids in Denver, her son and daughter each pick a local charity to help. They must donate a minimum of $10 from their allowance, which their parents match (up to $50). They talk about different causes, including the environment, soup kitchens, and so forth. One year, her son gave his money to a program to help underprivileged children, and her daughter gave hers for the homeless. The next year, both decided to support the local no-kill animal shelter, where they had gotten their own dog, Rascal. They went to the bank, where one withdrew $15 and the other $20, then went to Petco, where the family spent $70 on items from the shelter’s wish list.

Christmas Bread

It isn’t just money that makes a wonderful gift to others in your community. Dorothy Steinicke’s family has a tradition of making “ridiculously huge batches of a complicated Christmas bread and giving it away to neighbors, old friends, and people who just happen to cross our path, such as homeless people and deliverymen.” Dorothy says, “as my kids have gotten older they can participate more fully and now enlist some of their friends. It is pretty much an all-day endeavor, and then we have to rush to give it all away while the bread is still fresh!”

Kwanzaa

Introduced in 1966, Kwanzaa is a celebration of African culture that runs from the day after Christmas through New Year’s Day. Each day is devoted to a different principle. More and more cities have public Kwanzaa celebrations, but many African American families also observe the holiday at home.

Candle Ceremony

A basic part of Kwanzaa is lighting candles each night and talking about the principle of the day. In Washington, D.C., Yvette Aidara, mother of a teenage son, celebrates with a group of friends, who take turns hosting on successive evenings. Among the children present, a different one is chosen each night to say the name of the day’s principle in English and Swahili. Then, each person in the group says how he or she will put that principle into practice in the coming year.

History Game

Retelling history, particularly of one’s ancestors, is another important part of Kwanzaa, and the Ruff family of Dublin, Ohio, always includes a history game in its annual New Year’s Eve party. In one game, the names of famous Africans are pinned on the backs of some guests, and they ask questions of others until they guess the name pinned to them. Those who are able to celebrate Kwanzaa with much of their extended families favor oral history projects such as getting the children to tape-record interviews with their grandparents.

Creativity Party

Many families hold a party during the week of Kwanzaa around a particular theme. Angela Dodson and Michael Days in Trenton, New Jersey, usually choose the theme of creativity. Guests perform, tell stories, or read poems, and each brings a dish with African origins to the feast.