The Importance of Family Traditions

This whole blog is mostly for the benefit of my son. In the event I’m not able to personally pass my know-how along to him, I’m grateful that I have an amazing wife and a strong, cohesive family that I can rely upon to do it in my stead. 

Part of the reason my family is strong is that we have traditions. These traditions help contribute to a shared sense of values, bonding, and overall familial strength. If you have a family of your own, you’ve no doubt carried on at least some small family acts from your own childhood that you want to share with your loved ones.

I’ve thought through a whole host of traditions from my childhood that I intend to repeat often enough to make my son either hate them or love them. Hopefully it’ll be the latter.

Some of these traditions are embodied in family heirlooms, others lie in experiences, and still others exist as a combination of these two.

For example, my grandfather on my dad’s side served as a US Marine at Guadal Canal in WWII. He was part of the Marine Night Fighter Squadron and it seemed that was something he was eternally proud of in his life (deservedly so). Of all the things I know about him to this day, I truly believe he was a badass. I was lucky enough to inherit his K-Bar that he carried with him during the war, which I mounted in a shadow box and intend to pass down to my son as part of our family lore.  

It makes me extremely proud to be connected to my grandfather in this way, and I can only hope my son someday feels lucky to have a familial link to someone brave enough to answer the call to defend our country when it mattered most. 

This is perhaps my most treasured heirloom I intend to pass along. It’s unlikely to be very valuable to anyone else, but it’s invaluable to me and my family. 

As I think about it more, it seems like carrying on traditions is one of the greatest compliments I can pay my parents and family in a way that shows them how much I loved the childhood I was given. 

In any event, in an effort to list some of our family traditions for my little man, here goes!

• Every year on my birthday, I ask to have a meal of Rouladen (a traditional German dish). For dessert, I’ve been getting the same mint chocolate chip log cake from Baskin Robbins for probably at least 60 percent of my life.
• For several years on Christmas Day, I insisted that my brother, mom, and dad all play Monopoly. We haven’t done it in recent years, but that might just be because I’ve had a little guy to pay attention to instead of spending untold hours on contentious capitalism.
• Since I was a kid, each year we had a “Cookies for Santa” plate that we filled with cookies and set out on Christmas Eve. Damn if it wasn’t totally eaten every Christmas when I woke up in the morning… And now we have the plate from my parents. 🙂
• Maybe tradition, maybe heirloom, but the same teddy bear I slept with every night throughout my childhood (Snowy!) now sleeps with my son each night in his crib.
• There are a bunch of fun little artifacts from my childhood room that now adorn my son’s: A wooden wall bank with balloons, a lamp with a built-in nightlight, and a print of one of the pages from Goodnight Moon.
• Starting on the early side of the COVID pandemic, my wife and I started to designate Friday as “Wine and Steak Night” for meals. It’s really the only time we ever eat beef, so we leaned into it and it became a good reminder that the weekend’s arrival was worth celebrating.*

These are all little things that contributed to a childhood I thoroughly enjoyed that I want to pass along to my own little family. 

Traditions are pretty easy to make, but sometimes difficult to continue. If you have ones you value, I would argue that it’s worth the effort to ensure they continue. How about you, what kind of familial traditions do you have that you would like to pass along?

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*Even if we were too exhausted to do anything other than drink wine at home together. 🙂