Family Traditions

Family traditions…does your family have any.  You may think you don’t but there are many things that you do as a family that others may not.  You may think of them as normal daily life, but others might look at them as things that are out of the ordinary.  Let me give you a couple examples from my family.

I happen to have a very very close family (We are also kind of crazy, but that’s another story).  Some people consider close to be just mom, dad, brothers and sisters. But when my family gets together for anything, big or small, everyone comes.  Aunts, uncles, great aunts, great uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, cousins…and considering that my grandmother came from a family of 12, that’s a lot of people.  We have traditions for holiday times that mostly include the range of foods we eat.  My grandmother is from a Norwegian family, my grandfather is from a German family, and with my dad being Mexican we always bring the Mexican too! For Christmas Eve, it’s tradition to go to church to watch the younger cousins perform in the Christmas program.  When that is over, the entire family goes to my grandmother’s house where she has prepared a large pot of seafood chowder.  It’s awesome, so tasty and my favorite part is probably the potato and shrimp, i always pick them out of the pot. We also through together some guacamole which is always a big hit. (: Then we open the gifts that have been put in our Christmas stockings.  On Christmas day, we have Lutefisk and Lefse for dinner which is also Norwegian.  A tradition! But i usually don’t eat the lutefisk...it looks like gross jello.

When someone in our family gets married, the whole family comes together to help do the planning.  Because my family comes from a farming community, typically at the wedding reception, there is a meal, and then prior to everyone going home, there is another small meal.  Because the party gets over usually in after midnight, and the farmers are only going to get a couple hours of sleep, we send them home with a full belly so the wives can sleep in and they won’t be hungry when they are doing their chores.  That’s a tradition!

Another is when there is a wedding, my mom gets a phone call. She makes beautiful afghans (Blankets) and is always asked by the family of the couple getting married to make one for them as a shower gift.  That’s a tradition too!

So you see…if you sit down and look at your family, you will probably notice that you too have many traditions that you didn’t even know you had.(493)

-Ardeeemilla(: