Establishing Family Identity Through Traditions

Family identity is a big thing with me. I grew up in a family with a very strong identity, and it seemed to feed into some awareness with my siblings and I about what was expected of us and what was likely to tarnish the family name.

One of the ways that family identity is established is through family traditions. To really drive home how big of a deal this was in my family growing up, I can give you one example and need not offer any more. The Christmas that I was engaged, at the age of 22, my 18-year-old brother and I were still perched on the steps to see what Santa brought, like all the years past when our older siblings were there too.

My dad was waiting with his video camera, mounted with an obnoxiously bright light to mimic the one on his old 8mm camera that he used throughout our childhood. It wasn’t truly Christmas if you could see your gifts, after all.

Now it’s my turn to make my kids crazy with all of the things we must do every year. Our most central holiday tradition involves our tree. Every year since my husband and I got married, we drive over to Ted Drewes’ to pick out our Christmas tree. It’s always a big game to find a tree that comes in under our annual tree budget without being totally ugly, so we can sneak in an extra little gift for each other.

After my husband gets the tree tied to the car, we get our frozen custard and drive around St. Louis Hills, where several of the neighborhoods go all out with lights. I usually end up tossing all the kids’ coats in the wash as soon as we get home because it’s nearly impossible to get through the ride without a custard spill. But that’s part of the fun.

There have been a couple of memorable trips to get our tree, like the time our son was 3 and he stopped at every tree to hug it and say, “I wuv this Christmas tree!” and the year our kids were making us insane dodging in and out of the trees. We didn’t figure it out until later when they mentioned the “tree maze” and it all made sense. We had just happened to be at several fall festivals with mazes as part of the entertainment that year.

A lot of the traditions at our house involve food, made to share with friends and family. Every year my kids and I make gingerbread snowmen that we decorate with M&Ms. We also do traditional sugar cookies on another day, complete with decorations. Candy-making includes peanut butter balls and peppermint bark. My kids love to take their turn using our meat pounder to smash candy canes.

My 5-year-old daughter recently asked me if we were going to do our tradition with “the people in the boxes” and it took me a minute to figure out she wasn’t talking about something funeral-related. My mom gave us a great nativity set that comes with a story and each piece in a little gift box that the kids take turns opening once a week.

Another outing with our kids is centered on helping them purchase gifts for one another. My husband and I each take turns with the kids, taking them to the dollar store or Target to find something that they can buy out of their own small amount of saved money for each other and for us. We laughed the year that my son was determined to buy my husband a pair of kitchen shears, but we really try to let them do the purchasing without too much interference. It was sweet last year when they were 4 and 5 and they also budgeted to buy for their grandparents.

One of our most beloved Christmas traditions involves Christmas Eve. We have found that the only way to make Christmas simpler is to actually cut down on some of the places we go. Our church has a service on Christmas Eve, but we stay home for a quiet evening. We read about the first Christmas in the Bible and enjoy a simple dinner, and late in the evening we get in the car to look at Christmas lights again. After reading the classic poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the kids go to bed and we watch movies while we wait for things to get quiet.

None of these traditions are unique or new. A few of them, like reading the poem on Christmas Eve, come from my own childhood. But we hope that the fun we share over the holidays will keep them coming back for more, even when they are wise old teenagers just humoring their parents.