Since my brother moved away to Melbourne we have a "new age" tradition lol
Mum, Dad, DH and I sit at the dining table and eat dinner at 7pm every Sunday (rotating between their house and ours). We have the laptop set up on the end of the dining table and we call my brother on Skype. He has his dinner ready at the same time and we can all see each other, chat and eat dinner together. Quirky, but that's us
We have Friday Night Family Night. Usually it involves takeaway or a quick reheat dinner so no one's stuck doing dishes, then afterwards we play games or watch a movie together. When DH is away (seems like all the time these days) we go out and have (usually) Chinese soup for dinner on Fri nights instead.
I love the idea of a Sunday roast - Mum used to do it when we were growing up. However, being vegetarian I'm a bit stumped for an alternative!! Nut roast isn't quite the same somehow!
I'd love to have more traditions, and to establish some for the new little family we're soon to become. I do make sure we get a 'real' Christmas tree every year, and I go to select and cut it down with my mum and sister, and then have great fun decorating it, sometimes I even put carols on while I'm doing it. We always have a Christmas Eve dinner with just my immediate family, which is great fun and more relaxing than the Christmas day extended family onslaught.
I'd like to have some Easter traditions as well when we have our child/children. I used to love the Easter things we did as kids - decorating eggs, the Easter egg hunt etc. We're not religious, but it's still a time of year I like to mark because it's been celebrated for aeons and I like the symbolism.
I think modern, secular society needs more traditions! Well, I do anyway.
Great thread - please keep the good ideas coming!
ETA - I just remembered a great tradition one of my friends has - in November she gets all the ingredients for a fruit cake, and soaks the fruit in brandy for ages and bakes the cake. Then a couple of weeks before Christmas she has a girls' afternoon tea with proper posted invitations and we all exchange small gifts, eat cake and drink tea. It's really nice, she's been doing it for about four years now and it's one of the things I look forward to in the lead-up to Christmas.
Last edited by Devon; August 12th, 2008 at 12:59 PM.
That reminds me Devon - we are big Christmas people in our family. Every year on the 1st of December we put up the tree and decorate it together. Even when my Pop passed away on the 29th November 06 we still put the tree up on the 1st. We always crack open a bottle of champagne and toast when Dad puts the star on the top of the tree.
Amysarah - yes, I love Christmas. Even though I'm getting increasing fed up with the materialistic side of it, I love the anticipation and the tree, the focus on family and the feeling that it's a special time of year. The day itself I find exhausting, it's more the anticipation I enjoy.
I like your family's tradition of toasting the newly-decorated tree! That's great.
we always had lunch together as a family on sunday - usually roast. well, i'm an only child & so is my mum, so it was my parents & i and my mum's parents. we alternated between my grandparent's house & ours.
once i started school mum went back to work full time so friday nights were takeaway night. we pretty much always ate dinner together as a family (not so hard when there's only one child!).
i've just started in the habit of not cooking on a friday night and DP and I go to my parent's house most sunday evenings for dinner. sometimes i wish i could have a break but i know how much it means to my mum that the 4 of us have a meal together once a week & plus she's such a good cook!
I take DD to church every Sunday and sometimes DP comes. Doesn't sound like a 'tradition' as such, but we never went before DD was born, so it kinda is.
At Xmas time, the tree goes up the first weekend in December for us. We decorate it together, usually with an orphaned friend or two. I always go to Carols in the Domain and take DD (well, she's only had two, but it's a start!) and this year DP has promised to come with us (now DD is old enough to want him there!). And we go along to our church's kid's Xmas paegent on Xmas Eve.
We have an Easter egg hunt in the backyard at Easter time. Before our DD we used to have friends' kids around, last year it was just for her, but we might extend it next year.
I write DD a special letter to put away for her every birthday.
We have a bedtime ritual where we sit with her beside her bed and talk about her day and what she's going to do tomorrow (after the bath, bb and story routine). We kiss her good night and I have a special saying I whisper in her ear each night.
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