Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Making Memories Stick

I'm fairly accomplished at making comments on other people's blogs that would actually qualify as posts on my own.  Yet I stink at keeping my own blog up to date.  Maybe I just need their posts as prompts.  Anyhow, this is a Copy+Paste from a comment on another blog, but it seemed worthy of its own post. 

Traditions seem to me to be a means of "making memories stick." The repetition of the action helps us "memorize" the emotions we associate with them, which in turn allows us to more easily recognize and remember the variations, "that one time when..."

With all the craziness December handed us this year, I, once again, failed to send Christmas cards. I didn't get all the decorations up. Santa didn't even remember to put sweets in our stockings. Still, I made a point to decorate cutout cookies with the boys. THAT had always been one of MY favorite Christmas traditions, so I want to be sure they will have those memories too.

Growing up we would usually get new PJs on Christmas Eve, but I had never made the Biblical association; I really like that connection! Maybe we'll adopt that tradition here. That's one of the lovely things about having a young family: the kids are still small enough that we can make our own traditions. It's hard to watch things change from those traditions one grows up with, but sometimes they have to. But as long as we keep our traditions -- whatever they may be -- as efficacious signs of the Love of the season, they'll be perfect seeds of happy memories.

3 comments:

Jenn Flynn-Shon said...

I am fully in touch with the 'comment as long as a post' theory! Sounds like you're well on your way to starting a few wonderful traditions of your own this year & beyond! Those cookies look great, how fun to make them as a family :-) Hope you guys had a safe Christmas & New Year & the snow is melting faster there than it is here :-)

disabled account said...

This is a beautiful post and very thought provoking. I've always had a revulsion for traditions feeling that they were some kind of mindless ritual people practiced for reasons they never understood or remembered. this gives me new perspective, so thank you for that.

the cookies look delicious and i like the pj idea.

Julie said...

Good to see you both here! :)

The one thing I see I missed in just C+P from the original comment was the clarification of the PJ thing. The original blogger had mentioned how her mom would always give her and her sister pjs on Christmas Eve; they would unwrap them while listening to the Christmas story. They made the connection between Mary swaddling her Son and their own mother giving warm "swaddling" of their own. I thought that was cool. :)

Hope you both are staying warm -- there's no more snow here, but I still can't keep my feet warm, no matter how thick my socks are!