Blending Old and New Family Tradition Ideas

All newlywed couples have to deal with the blending of two sets of family traditions...his and hers. Sheri and I were no different. Some of our traditional family "rituals" went well together and complimented each other nicely.

Her family opened gifts on Christmas Eve and my family opened them on Christmas morning. Well, when we still lived near home, this made it easy for us. We spent Christmas Eve with her family and the next morning was spent with my family.

When the kids came along, though, we had to "compromise".

In her family gifts from Santa came wrapped...in mine, all the gifts from Santa were unwrapped and set out on display. This was important to me because, as kids, we were allowed to get up early and play with gifts from Santa. But the wrapped gifts from family and friends weren't to be touched until mom and dad were up.

Well, we "compromised" ...we did it just as her family did!

Seriously though, she made concessions as well. Our kids have always opened their gifts on Christmas morning...just as my family always did.

Thanksgiving was easy. The more food the better, right? So, our Thanksgiving table consists of all the very best family recipes from her family and my family.

Family tradition is one of the few things that stays constant in our lives. We merge the best from both sides of the family. Likewise we are always on the lookout for cool new family tradition ideas!

One new family tradition idea that we plan to start this year is that of putting our written New Year’s resolution into our Christmas stockings, right as we are ready to put them away for the year.

Then, when we get the Christmas stockings out again the next year, we all can read and decide whether or not we met those resolutions. It just sounded like a great idea. We are going to try it this year!

Life wouldn't be nearly the same without family traditions to cherish and look forward to.

Our children will never forget us, but it will be during the observance of long-held family traditions that their memory of us will be the strongest.

http://www.familyhistoryproducts.com/family-tradition-ideas.html

Тема: MY HOME

HOME – BUT NOT ALONE

Dave and Steve Briggs share a bedroom in their parents' house. You might think that’s quite normal for brothers, but Dave and Steve aren't teenagers. They're both in their mid-thirties and their parents are now retired. They are part of a growing number of children who are being forced to live with their parents well into adulthood, simply because they can't afford to rent or buy a place, of their own. Steve has lived in the two-bedroom terraced house in the London suburb of Walthamstow nearly all his life, apart from two years when he was studying nursing in Derby. While he was there, he suffered a nervous breakdown and came home before completing his course.

'It was a difficult, time,’ he said. ‘It was the first time I’d really been away from my family and I was finding the course quite stressful. In the end, I just couldn’t cope and my life just went to pieces. I’ve suffered from depression ever since, which has meant I've been in and out of work a lot, but I've always been able to come home and know I'll be looked after, that I won't end up on the streets because I couldn’t afford to pay the rent’.

All that changed when Dave got divorced and had to leave his large four-bedroom house to his wife and two kids. He had originally left home at seventeen, when he joined the army, and now works as a mechanical engineer for Ford Motors. ‘When Lisa and I divorced, I thought I would just rent somewhere close by so I could just drop in and see the kids easily, but when I started looking, I just couldn’t believe how expensive everything was. I'd never actually had to rent a flat before, being in the army, and most landlords wanted something like a hundred and fifty pounds a week just for a tiny studio flat I thought about buying, but over the ten years Lisa and I had lived in our place, prices had just rocketed. I mean, for the money we paid for our house ten years ago, we could probably only get a one or two-bedroom flat in a large block now. It's ridiculous! There were cheaper places, but they were in really rough parts of town, where I wouldn't want my kids walking around. And the trouble is, it's not stopping prices have almost doubled just in the two years I've been staying with my parents. You know, the other day I saw a parking space being sold for £73,000! The world’s gone mad!’

So how does he find living at home again? 'It was quite weird for a long time, but you get used to it. It has its advantages. I still get my meals cooked and my clothes washed, but of course, it's difficult to have any privacy Steve snores, really badly. And he's; always smoking. It's really disgusting! I sometimes stay over at my girlfriend's flat, and I’m trying to persuade her to let me move in, but she's not keen at the moment. So what else can I do?'

As many people know, the answer is ‘Not much’. Unless, of course, you're prepared to move to a poor industrial town in the north or a tiny little village right out in the countryside, where you can buy a house for a tenth of the price it would be in London, I did suggest this to Steve.

Hugh Dellar, Andrew Walkley. Innovations. SB. Thomson, 2010.

Тема: TRAVELLING

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 722