Traditions! Traditions!

As you can probably tell from the blog, I've been thinking about family traditions. Larry and I have adopted a few of our own family traditions. We just started buying Pajama pants for each of our visitors from out of town. I started trying something new for each year of my age. We held our first annual snowflake cutting contest earlier this year (we ate a dinner of all white food, a great idea from Cat who also provided the meal, and the prize winners got some warm article of clothing like a hat or scarf).


Since I've been paying attention I've heard about some other really cool family traditions that I would like to adopt. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Every New Year's Eve my friend Rachel's family writes predictions for what will happen to each member of the family in the next year (John will propose to his girlfriend, Jane will get her first kiss, etc.) They each keep their predictions a secret. They seal them in a jar and wait to open and read them on the next New Year to see who was correct.
• At a park here in Columbus they hold a moonlight/flashlight Easter egg hunt for older kids. That would bring back some of the fun of the Easter egg hunt once kids are past believing in the Easter Bunny.
• On the last day of school, my parent's neighbor's family skips dinner and celebrates with a banana split night.
• Candice has started making a cd of her kids' favorite songs each year and keeps all of the cdÂ’s together for them in an album. It's kind of like the soundtrack to their lives.
• On birthdays another family is visited by the fairy of the age the birthday boy/girl is turning. IE if a child is turning five, the five fairy visits and leaves five $1 bills, five tubs of playdough, five cookies, and five pieces of sidewalk chalk.
• Growing up my family held an annual Family Home Evening award ceremony. Everyone dresses up and each child receives a few awards for things they did very well that year and one award for something they need to work on. Each child gets to give a thank you speech after each award. Ie, One child might get an award for showing a lot of improvement in school that year and the same child might also win the award for being the hardest to get out of bed in the morning (not that it ever happened to me or anything . . .)

I think they're all such fun, original ideas. It makes we wonder what other amazing family traditions I'm missing out on. If you can think of any to share, I'd love to hear them.