Since Christmas is near I thought I would stray off the frugal track just a bit and talk about something that is near and dear to my heart. While the idea of Christmas Traditions is in fact centuries old, it is an idea that has been growing in popularity lately as more families seek ways to connect and bring meaning to their Christmas.
For those on a budget or seeking to avoiding keep up with the Jones’s, building Christmas traditions can be a great way to take the focus off material things and put it on traditions that can offer something far more permanent than expensive gifts and rich foods.
Christmas traditions offer memories that will be held dear and passed on from one generation to another generation and offer you and your family the opportunity to build something more out of Christmas.
While there are many old time honored traditions that surround Christmas you can use any of these or your can make your own, there really is no limit to the traditions that you create, simply that you do them each year.
For some it may be volunteering to help with dinner at the
shelter, or putting gifts under the giving tree. Others may keep it closer to home and traditions may center on putting up the tree, or string popcorn to hang up. For some a trip around town to see all the Christmas lights and stopping for hot cocoa may be the tradition they remember into adulthood and share with their kids.
I remember as a child listening to first Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas record as we decorated the Christmas tree, making Christmas cookies, and waking up our parents when it was still dark out.
As my children grew up we had many traditions between giving back to the community, helping children less fortunate, and our homebound traditions of putting up the tree on the Friday after Thanksgiving, making candy and a homemade stocking for each person in the family.
As time has gone on we have added traditions to these, these traditions came as our oldest children began to grow up and our youngest child came along, one year we decided to do Christmas dinner on Christmas eve and do leftover’s and cold cuts on Christmas day. It was our last Christmas with the oldest kids and we wanted to spend the day with them not in the kitchen!! We decided we liked that arrangement so much it has become our tradition for every year since then.
We go to see the lights at the amusement park every year even though they rarely change, but out of that I have the picture of my daughters last visit to see Santa.
Traditions serve to ground us, bring us closer to our family, and closer to the holidays and our purpose in celebrating them.
Spending a lot of money on the holidays is often an attempt at creating memories when memories cannot be created by material things, when the thing is gone, often so too is the memory. Traditions are the memories that we seek, family ties and closeness is what we crave. So put down the Credit card and pick up the music CD or popcorn and get started creating memories!!
If you have traditions you would like to share please take the time to leave a comment and let us know!!