Traditions
I don’t know what traditions you grew up with in your family, but I did not grow up with many regular traditions. Sarah and her family still practice many to this day and it is beautiful to see Barrett, Sarah’s cousin Bryce, and our sweet nieces participate in old traditions of this holiday season. On Sarah’s side, they would all dress up in matching pjs on Christmas Eve and watch a movie. The women of her family attend a “Tea Party” at Moma J’s while they read a Christmas book, drink hot chocolate, and eat cookies. On her mom’s side, her Nanny and Bobby give all the family ornaments that reflect big things that happened that year. An example of this is when they got her a car ornament for her 16th birthday, and a bride and groom ornament on Christmas of 2020 when Sarah and I got married.
The few traditions that I do have, I hold very dear. Every year my sweet Nana would go to the bank and take out $50 for each grandkid, leave it in the envelope from the bank. Then she would place small stuffed animals around her Christmas tree with all the names of the grandkids assigned to a specific animal that would play a message telling us where our gift was hidden (I know you are dying to know which animal was mine, it was a panda!)
We all knew what was in the envelopes. It was something she did for almost two decades. She passed away in February of 2019. That very last Christmas we spent together, when it came time to search of the animals, she made us work harder than ever to find our envelopes. It didn’t help that she hadn’t replaced the batteries in those things in years so it took a few minutes for us to figure out what the animals were actually saying. When we got to Christmas of 2019 and we walked into my Grandad’s house, the animals were all in their place around the Christmas tree. As we ate and talked, we all kept looking to the tree wondering what Grandad had planned for the evening. As we gathered around the tree, he sat at his chair and said we needed to talk about what to do next. He was always the one who hid them but never recorded the messages. He told us that he didn’t feel right doing this tradition without our sweet Nana being around to orchestrate it. He mentioned the soft and static voices of the animals and said that he voted for them to be retired. They had served an amazing purpose of sending us on wild goose chases around their house. We unanimously agreed that those sweet animals that always brought us such joy may not bring us that same happiness this year, but possibly open us back up to some new grief. To this day, I still believe that putting those animals away in a box was best for our family.
When I think about my family in this new season of life with a growing boy, I look to that tradition and think it was great for the time that it served. We all laugh and smile when we think of that fun tradition that Nana gave us and we look ahead to a day where we see her no longer in a run down state like those animals were. We will see her in our “advent” into Heaven to once again see her in the fullness that God sees her in.
Whether you start a new tradition this year or you end a tradition to honor someone or something you have lost along the way, my prayer is that you hear the words of John as he writes in Revelation, a book both my grandmothers loved to quote when talking about meeting our Creator in all of his glory. Revelation 21:5 says, “And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” This holiday season, may you strive to create new traditions that point your family to all the new and great things God is doing in our lives!