With families that change and shift over the years, it’s not always easy to develop traditions with your kids. Over the years, the exact day we celebrate Christmas with each side of the family has changed, the sizes of the families have changed, the menus have changed and even the day we celebrate Christmas with just the five of us has changed. One tradition I have insisted on with my children is that we make Christmas goodies together. Even this year when it means getting my son to come in from out of town, we are going to be frosting cookies, decorating pretzels, making mints and mixing puppy chow together. When they were all much younger, it often wasn’t all that much fun. It was messy, the kids often got so wound up they had to be sent to time out, and it was a lot more work than it would have been to just do it myself. In fact, I was known to get a little cranky at times. Now we all look back at those times and laugh. At least once during the festivities, someone will jokingly tell one of the kids that they need to go to the steps for a time out. We’ll all tease my husband about his insistence that we shouldn’t put too much frosting on the cookies (no one eats his sparingly frosted cookies until the others are all gone every year but he still tries to make us go easy). It’s even a tradition now for my daughter to, at least once while frosting cookies, shake entirely too much colored sugar on the cookie she’s working on.
Except for the cookies, figuring out how to make some of the other goodies into a family event was tricky. But over the years, we developed “jobs” that each person has for each treat that we make. And everybody gets to take a turn shaking the bag when we’re making puppy chow. Why is that so much fun? Long ago I decided we didn’t need quite as many Christmas treats as my mom always made and I gradually cut back. Now the only things that get made are the things we can do together.
Over the years, there have occasionally been other people with us when we did the cookies. At first, I wasn’t very happy about it. I mean, it was supposed to be a thing for the five of us. But eventually I realized that it was an okay thing for the kids friends to see us all having a good time together and including them in family traditions is one of the reasons that so many of them call my husband and me “Mom” and “Dad.” So bring on the extra kids. Just make sure that they know that it just might be one of them that gets sent to the steps.
What a great tradition and a wonderful anecdote about it! Thank you for sharing, Lisa. I too have this tradition with my sons and I have been known to get cranky as well, but that's just part of being a family. And I'm with you...the more the merrier. Why not share the joy with other children who may not have this tradition in their own families.
Awwww that sounds so cool and tasty :)
ReplyDeleteMy oldest son came into town this morning just to frost cookies. Now that he's moved out of town, it was nice that it was only the five of us. We almost got all of the way through the frosting before I had to send him to the stairs. My daughter, true to form, had a slight green sugar mishap which we now laugh about instead of getting cranky about the waste.
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