Family traditions can be a great way to strengthen your connection with your family and have something to hold onto from one another even when you’re not able to physically be together anymore. However, family traditions often don’t just happen. To really set a family tradition in stone, you have to be intentional about it.
To assist you in doing this, here are three tips for making your own family traditions.
Talk To Your Elders About Traditions They Remember
Starting a family tradition from scratch can be a challenge. Because of this, you might want to start considering family traditions by thinking about what your family may have done in the past.
If you can’t remember any family traditions that you’ve been a part of, consider visiting your elderly family members in their homes or their senior living communities to see if they remember traditions from their childhood or even adulthood. Not only could this help give you a jumping off point for bringing these traditions back, but the fact that these traditions have been passed down from generation to generation can help them mean more to everyone involved. They might even remember traditions that they’d heard about from family members older than them, which could be fun to reinstitute.
Think Of What Will Work For Your Family
Before you start putting together all of these new family traditions that you want everyone to get behind, you should first think about how any new tradition will actually work for your family.
While you might have good intentions with certain traditions, if they aren’t something that many of your family members actually want to do or that would be too challenging to put together on the basis that you’re wanting it done, this might not be a tradition to start. Rather, try to find traditions that really work with your family’s identity and the things that you’re already doing in your life together.
Keep Your Family Traditions Simple
Ideally, the beginning of family traditions should be as simple as possible. Especially if you’re trying to start traditions with a young family, managing your expectations for how things will turn out and what you’re actually capable of at this stage in life can help to make your attempts to start family traditions much more successful. Then, as time goes on and you and your family get more comfortable with the traditions that you’ve started, you can begin to expand on them or tweak them if that’s what your family wants to do.
If you want your family to have more family traditions that you can do together throughout the years, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you learn how to get started with this and choose traditions that can stand the test of time.
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