Traditions, nothing stays the same. Should it?

When I was a granny for the first time, I made an Advent calendar from a kit for my granddaughter. When her sister was born, I did the same. When we stayed for Christmas with my daughter and her family, the calendars were already in use, and I was surprised and delighted when my eldest granddaughter recently told me she would be using the same calendar this year for her own little daughter. As a rule, I think children of all ages enjoy customs. In our own home, we always do "first foot" for New Year.

To go to your OP Laura our family traditions evolve, particularly at Christmas and we’re all for it. Last year, with the restrictions stopped the children and GC’s staying from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day. This year DD and GC’s will leave after lunch, DS has formed his own family unit, we will meet and exchange gifts before the day. I’ll still make stuffing for all to my dear Dad’s recipe. My DD helps out at a homeless centre over Christmas, her new tradition.
We still have the family ‘whistle’ used to gather wandering people when out, the GC’s still roll painted hard boiled eggs down a hill at Easter, so some things carry on.
I’m all for new blood and new ideas, enjoying some of the old and memories of those past.

Yes Welbeck, India in the 50s……we were not rich but certainly not poor .

JaneJudge

part of the party food is sliced cucumber and sliced onion in vinegar served in a glass dish on the table

OMG That brings back memories of childhood but normal tea with bread and butter not at Christmas.

I suppose the same could be said of some of the long running threads. Some of the original or long time posters like them to stay as they are whereas others think that they are enriched by new people coming and going with a different take on things. Evolving just like life.

Traditions are adapted through generations.
What I did as a child, what we did for our children and now I have told my children that as they now have their own children make your own Traditions to suit your family.
They love what we did with them as youngsters especially at Christmas time which is a joy to hear.
They both have continue our family Traditions in a similar way, but added their own personal family twist.

Look how young professional families these days have domestic help. My immediate neigh,have a gardener several days a week and a cleaner, and used to have someone who looked after the children after school.

welbeck

was it a colonial setting, or military. the old empire ?
how else could you have servants yet not be rich ?

My friend grew up in India and they had servants; not many, but a cook, a maid or two, a gardener.
She found it rather hard at first when she was married and came to the UK and had to 'do' for herself.
She is Indian, not British btw.

It wasn't just the British who had servants.

I grew up in Fiji where my father was a mining engineer, we had a Fijian housegirl who did all the housework and the cooking. We had a gardener too. We were neither rich nor poor it’s just how it was in many poorer countries. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong but I suppose we created employment.

welbeck, As mentioned above my father was in the army and we lived in the Far East for much of the 1950s. We had staff. An Amah who did the housework and a cook, when living in a flat, and a gardener who came in half a day a week when we lived in a house.

You didn't have to be rich, I doubt, at the time there was an army family of any rank serving in the far East that didn't have at least one servant. It is different now.

When in the UK my mother had a cleaner 2 mornings a week, and often not even that. Just after the war both my grandmothers and my mother had the same cleaner. She came to our house two mornings, to my paternal grandparents, who still had children at home, for 2 days and my widowed grandmother one day. She was almost part of the family and my grandparents included her in family parties.

Sorry, I am in the US so I am going to talk Thanksgiving. It is literally my favorite holiday at this point in my life. Even last year during Covid on lockdown, I cooked the standard Thanksgiving fare, just on a smaller scale. Still made home made pumpkin pie from pumpkins I grew the summer before.

Funny story, my husband grew up with different traditions, one of them being oyster dressing with the turkey. As a loving wife, I wanted to make sure I included his favorite dish. He gave me the recipe, which said to put the oysters in the breadcrumbs. I assumed it was the whole can, it should have been ONE oyster from the can. He never asked me to make it again, though I would now that I know I was wrong.

I have brought many family traditions along with me, and created new. Some are silly like canned cranberry sauce (yuck) that my grandparents and parents love. I prefer home made from fresh cranberries.

Christmas traditions, I always allowed my children to wake up in their own beds on Christmas, as my mom did. I usually invite everyone over in the afternoon for family gifts and a meal. Though we do potluck Mexican so I am not standing at the stove all day.

Growing up, my dad had us put tinsel on our Christmas tree one by one. It was tedious for a kid to do. Instead, I buy a new ornament each year for each child. I plan to box them all up when they get married and give them to them. Now that they are older, they pick their own ornaments each year. It is a nice way to look back and see what their interests were at the time.

I buy my kids new pajamas to open on Christmas Eve. They are teenagers now and still love it. I could imagine them wanting me to continue when they are adults.

My husband brought some traditions from his family. He comes from Acadians (France through Canada into Louisana). He loves Cajun food and cooks it any time he can. He has really imparted his family traditions with this. The one my kids love the most though is a crawfish boil. He pays each year to fly crawfish up from the Gulf of Mexico to where we are and boil them spicy. They will sit for hours off and on eating the spicy little bugs.

I always love seeing what traditions are in other countries and love to share ours. So different in such a small world sometimes.

was it a colonial setting, or military. the old empire ?
how else could you have servants yet not be rich ?

CrazyH, i can't get it. where is/was this culture where maids and cooks were commonplace yet you were not rich ?

I suppose Christmas traditions are the most kept ones. I like the way they are melded together from two different lines in each marriage. I really love some we've adopted from DH's family, others we created ourselves. Our children have taken some from their childhoods and blended them with traditions from their wive's families.
I used to recite The Night Before Christmas each year on Christmas Eve to my children, sadly none of them learned it by heart like me I grew up with the cold meats, mashed potato and pickle Boxing Day tradition and do follow it, if not Boxing Day then the very next one. I think traditions are there to be adapted but are a chord that connects generation to generation, a lovely way to connect to the past, present and future. My eldest was very perturbed at Father Christmas entering his bedroom while he was asleep, so we arranged for the gifts to be left in a designated place in the living room. My, what a fuss was made when a few years later when FC got confused which child's gifts were left in which armchair or place on the sofa......... traditions matter!!!

We have many traditions in our family - mostly introduced by me because when my children were very young I read that traditions encourage a feeling of security and helped bonding.

Every year I organise a multi-generation holiday in Cornwall, staying in the same area and visiting the same places. This year because of COVID us older ones dropped out and our eldest son arranged the holiday - camping this year so they could all stay outdoors and not risk bringing COVID home. They sent lots of photo’s of themselves in our usual haunts and maintaining our family traditions.

Christmas has been adapted slightly to incorporate my daughter-in-law’s tradition of having Christmas breakfast (brunch) with her parents. So we now eat slightly later so that they can first visit her family and then they join us for ours. It’s been a joy to see how she and our son have merged their respective family’s traditions and are now creating ones of their own.

We’re very fortunate to have a house big enough that our sons can bring their families to stay over the holiday period. My older son’s in-laws live just around the corner and my husband’s parents also live nearby. We’re all good friends too, which helps!

Christmas Eve is spent having an early salmon and salad dinner followed by family games. Christmas Day has lots of traditions, but can still be adaptable. One year we ate Christmas dinner from the boot of our car at the beach and on another we took it as a picnic onto the local moors, but we always start the day with a CD of Carols, stockings by beds and everyone mucking in to do the last minute prep. Gifts are opened one at a time after lunch (therefore never before 3pm, except for the one gift that’s taken to be unwrapped at church) and are handed out from under the tree by Mother Christmas; my mother-in-law initially, but now me.

Boxing Day sometimes includes a swim in the sea followed by a quick run home and into the sauna by the menfolk, but always there is a long walk, visitors, endless food being served up and an organised activity for the children, young people and adults to play together.

This year I’ve bought a Piñata for the first time in many years. The last time we had one was the Boxing Day before my son-in-law was killed in Afghanistan and the memory of how excited he was by it and the gusto with which he played caused great hilarity at the time. We haven’t had one at Christmas since then, but I hope that this year we’ll be able to cope with the memory and I plan to reinstate the tradition for his son and my other grandchildren.

New Year’s Day is when our youngest son produces our Family Quiz Night. The children are put to bed and then wine or cocktails will be drunk, chocolates eaten and heads scratched as we puzzle over his bespoke questions relating to family happenings during the previous year. Youngest son is a keen observer of idiosyncrasies and his quiz always produces much laughter - some of it at my expense it has to be said. ?

I love hearing about other people’s traditions! We have very few really but there’re immovable, I always have to make tablet at Christmas. There’s a special tin for it, a Cadbury’s biscuit tin from many years back. Even those in the family who don’t particularly like tablet would be horrified if it wasn’t there at a Christmas together!! Oh and we never have turkey, it always has to be roast beef. Our children have all created their own traditions, as we did in our day m, but still want us to adhere to ours too.

JaneJudge

part of the party food is sliced cucumber and sliced onion in vinegar served in a glass dish on the table

My Mum used to make that to go with salad and luncheon meat, followed by peaches and evaporated milk then home-made cake for Sunday tea every week.

I haven't followed the tradition, we eat in the evening now although I did slave over a hot stove every Sunday morning until the DC all left home.

Very few traditions left now in our small family mostly just what DH and I do together. DH makes a Xmas pudding around late October. I follow on with the Xmas cake in November, ice it in December. I bake mince pies before xmas Eve and we usually share a nice dinner with some good wine. On Xmas morning after breakfast we get read in some of our nicest clothes and exchange presents over a glass of champagne. I do a full Xmas dinner which we have after the Queens speech. Some years we see DD2 and or my sister and BIL. That's about it. Sorry should have said Carols from Kings on Xmas Eve is a must even though it makes me cry as does The Snowman which I watch on my own at some point.

Traditions do have their uses. My father was in the army and we were constantly on the move, but the one thing that remained immutable was how we spent Christmas Day, no matter where we lived, Hong Kong, Malaya, Germany, Carlisle, London. large army quarter, small temporary hiring. The same decorations adapted for every home, however temporary, teasing on Christmas Eve about what we wanted DF's socks for, why we couldn't hang our own small socks up, Midnight Mass, stocking and present opening routines.

In a childhood of frequent house and school moves, these unchanging rituals anchored the family. My father brought these traditions from his family. His father was also in the army. It meant when my sister and I spent a couple of Christmases with my grandparents when we were at boarding school, we were linked with our parents on Christmas day by finding that my grandparents did on Christmas day, everything that our parents were doing 8,000 miles away.

My children won’t let me change our Christmas traditions! I want to make things a bit easier for us but all hell breaks out if I suggest an artificial tree or having something different for the Christmas meal.

Having four DC and associated families, I also suggested we simplified gift-giving by having a form of Secret Santa instead. There was mutiny in the ranks at that and so we plough on with countless wish lists and who-buys-what and duplicated presents.

I’m not the stick in the mud, that’s for sure.

Orlin’s family had a tradition of each doing a party piece to earn their supper on New Year’s Eve, I soon knocked that on the head.

Traditions or house rules?
Homework always had to be completed before dinner. Meals always together at the table. These rules/traditions are only carried on by two of the four of the next generation.

Yes JaneJudge we always had the early riser, just as we got the last filled stocking on to the end of the final bed and crawled exhausted and slightly inebriated in to bed we’d hear ‘He’s been’. Hence the overcooked turkey and forgotten stuffing moments.

part of the party food is sliced cucumber and sliced onion in vinegar served in a glass dish on the table