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Family Rituals and Traditions
Now More Important Than Ever
By Janet Dengel
Use the five senses to guarantee a lasting memory:
- Your youngster will long remember the tunes of family sing-a-longs, the smells of holiday baking or the feeling of warmth and the sight of dancing flames when the fireplace is lighted after Sunday dinner.
- Make tapes of family stories, history and songs, and videotape special events so your child can look back fondly on the rituals that were so important in her life.
Adopt some kid-inspired traditions:
- Have a sleep-out in the living room once a year with movies, popcorn and flashlights dancing on the ceiling.
- Eat the worst, most sugary, gooey breakfast cereals one Saturday morning a month and watch early morning cartoons.
Establish constructive rituals that help solve problems or encourage good habits:
- At dinner, by sharing the best and worst thing that happened to each family member that day, you can encourage talking about feelings, problems or accomplishments that may otherwise be overlooked.
- Play "Pass the Book" each night to inspire a love for reading. (Each reader reads a page and passes the book along to the next person.) Children who can't read yet can describe what they see in the pictures or switch from lap to lap as the book is passed.
- Go on a family morning or night walk at least once a week and get in the exercise habit.
Seasonal and holiday rituals have a special magic:
- Set up a scavenger hunt to let your child find his birthday present.
- On the first day of spring look at a seed catalog and decide what to plant.
- Put salt in Dad's coffee on April Fool's Day.
- Host a watermelon seed-spitting contest each summer.
- Rake leaves and jump in them each fall.
- Hae a family snowball fight.
- Turn up the heat in the dead of the winter, put on your bathing suits and have an indoor beach party.
- On Thanksgiving Day hang up your child's artwork depicting things to be thankful for.