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.