Family Rituals

[Ken Anderson]

I don't have anything to share at the moment, but I will later. Still, I wanted to introduce a topic that might spark some discussion here, given that things tend to slow down in a forum with fewer than a hundred members, many of them inactive. Whether you're thinking back to the family you lived with as a child or the family that you created as an adult, what frequent activities or rituals did you have that were important to the family or to you as an individual?

Often characterized as Sunday drives, we had something similar, only on Saturdays rather than Sundays, given that, between the morning and evening services, and family visits or visitors that tended to fall on Sundays, there wasn't much time for Sunday drives. But on Saturdays, not every Saturday, but often, whoever wanted to come along would go for a drive, either to parts of Michigan's Upper Peninsula that were remote from us or to places in Northern Wisconsin. Sometimes, my parents would have a destination in mind, but the ride itself was the activity.

 

[Hedi Mitchell]

If we had any, I have forgotten them. Parents often worked two jobs so they were busy most of the time.

 

[Mary Robi]

The Sunday afternoon drive always ended at an A&W Root Beer stand, where my dad got a large mug, mom and I got medium mugs, the rest of the kids got kiddie sizes. There was one package of pretzels for the front seat occupants and one for the backseat.

To this day, drinking an A&W Root Beer takes me back to those Sunday drives.

 

[Beth Gallagher]

When our blended family was settling in and getting used to living together after we got married, it was kind of a circus at the dinner table with 5 little kids. One evening I decided to put candles on the table, and assigned one kid to light them. The children were small, and they were amazed that they were allowed to handle matches, haha.

Having candles on the table and an assigned "match lighter" each day turned out to be a ritual of sorts. After dinner they used the candle snuffer to put the candles out. Somehow they never got tired of that, even after they were bigger kids.

 

[Ken Anderson]

As a single parent, some things were easier, others more difficult, and a few were perhaps impossible. Trying to replicate holiday traditions that were an important part of my own childhood was in the impossible category. Christmas Dinners are not the same when there are only two people, and that's just one example.

Instead, I tried to create other memorable moments, and I suppose I succeeded because my grandchildren have heard some of the stories. Because I had a steady, well-paying job that came with a lot of vacation and holiday time, and I didn't spend it on alcohol and tobacco, I could afford to do some of these things.

For example, before one long weekend when my son was about ten or so, I had him close his eyes and put a finger down on a map of the United States, and we ended up flying, then renting a car, to travel to some little town in North Dakota, where there was pretty much nothing for someone who didn't live there to do.

One summer, I saved up my 5 vacation weeks until the end of my anniversary year, then tacked on the 6 weeks I was entitled to the following year, threw in all of my floating holidays, and took most of the summer off. The company was not happy, and the next contract year, they insisted on a clause that wouldn't allow more than two weeks at a time. We drove from California to Michigan, taking our time, sometimes camping out, and at other times, getting a hotel room. One day, we had camped along a river, driving only about twenty or twenty-five miles the next day, and found an even nicer place to camp, so we stopped for the night before noon.

Another time, we set off to drive to Yosemite, not knowing, because I never check ahead, that we'd be snowed in and unable to get near the place. Was I supposed to know that it snowed in California? Still, it was a fun trip.

These weren't traditions in the sense of doing the same thing at the same time each year, but rather a tradition of crazy travel and unplanned vacations.