What is your favorite tradition? Hear others’ special traditions and get ideas for adding new ones to your life.
Traditions, big or small, bring rhythm to our lives and tighten our bonds with those we hold dear. That's precisely what we're delving into in this episode. You'll find inspiration in these beautiful rituals that spark connections, help us treasure significant moments, and serve as poignant reminders of gratitude. Tune in to these heartwarming stories and you might just pick up some ideas to incorporate into your own life. Advice Column crowd-sources answers to give our listeners the opportunity to share their own traditions, adding to the richness of our shared human experience.
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Advice Column - Crowd-Sourced Ideas for Living with Intention.
Speaker 1:
Hello friend, welcome to Advice Column. I love traditions. They help me tune in and mark special moments in my life, and I also like that they create a comforting rhythm to my days, months and years. I pay attention to the seasons because I have special traditions that I do to mark each one, and I love that. traditions also help me stay connected to the people I love, for example, our family. We don't all share the same faith, but we still have a tradition of saying a grace before dinner and saying something we're thankful for, and I feel like that connects me with them. And then there's things like honoring traditions I had with my grandfather. That helps me keep him and the people I love alive and with me.
Speaker 1:
So I was really interested to find out what other people's traditions were and maybe to get some ideas for incorporating more rituals or traditions into my own life. So in this episode we asked people what is a tradition, big or small, that you love, and I really enjoyed hearing some of the answers. In fact, we had so many interesting ones that we divided this episode up and we're going to have a special episode that's just for holiday traditions And then this one is the answers that were related to kind of the non holiday times. So I hope you get some great ideas and enjoy hearing how people celebrate the moments in their lives. So let's dive right in.
Speaker 2:
A fun family tradition is what I have every Sunday with my husband Ben. We do our workout class and then we go to brunch afterwards. It's great for our fitness and great for our romance.
Speaker 3:
At the end of every school year I make a gigantic banner that says Welcome to Summer. I put it up and have my kids run through the banner and burst through to officially welcome Summer.
Speaker 4:
I've learned to create new traditions that honor my late husband's memory. It's interesting how life has a way of shaping our experiences and creating new traditions. On my husband's first birthday after his passing, my daughters and I joined his family at my in-laws house to celebrate his life and enjoy one of his favorite dishes bean and cheese papusas. This simple act of coming together over food allowed us to feel connected to him and honor his memory.
Speaker 5:
My family tradition is telling each other something specific during the week, to each person and the family, of how we are grateful for something or how they helped us. As we go through it, it really does change the dynamics of how we look at each other and how we're treating each other, and it really just becomes more of an even habit in the tradition because we want to show each other how much we mean to each other Every year we would go and visit the grandparents.
Speaker 6:
The seven of us just enjoyed a week or two together, which didn't happen very often. It was impactful to all of us because we got to be part of their lives.
Speaker 7:
Our family started a tradition of family movie night a few years ago. Our kids are now five, seven, nine and 11 and we love nothing more than to cuddle on the couch and watch a favorite movie. One of the special things about it for us is that we actually introduced our children to movies that were important to us when we were children. So it gives us an opportunity to kind of all be on the same plane, enjoying time together, enjoying to connect and, for my husband and I, enjoying time to reminisce over what was important to us and what we enjoyed when we were younger.
Speaker 8:
Every year we go on a group camping trip. It's an opportunity for my sister and I to see our dad once a year, which I hold so close to my heart. We usually head somewhere where we can find mountain lakes, kayaking, playing games and making memories. So it's a magical time to see family without the usual hustle and bustle that you get during the holidays, and I can't wait for our next adventure.
Speaker 9:
Every Friday night I bake the traditional holla bread for our Friday night Sabbath dinner. It's symbolically representing an offering to the divine, the concept when we sit together at a table, we literally break bread together. We actually tear pieces of the holla out. So that's my favorite tradition every Friday and enjoy it with my family and friends.
Speaker 6:
A fun family tradition was going to Pettit Jean in Arkansas and just going into the mountains and hiking and just being out in nature, just being able to experience the natural beauty of the state. I guess you could say it impacted me spiritually.
Speaker 10:
One of the traditions we had for birthdays was something that my grandma used to do, where she would make this big bowl of candy and it was a mix of a couple of things and it had nuts in it and she would make it for all the birthdays and then sometimes my mom would make it and then it sort of got forgotten and then I started baking it again and everyone really likes it. Apparently, when my grandma made it you weren't allowed to pick through it. But we pick through it, pick out what we want.
Speaker 11:
My wife and I enjoyed playing word games with the kids to help them improve their grammar, build a richer vocabulary, from hangman to the alphabet game where you go through the alphabet to name different subjects. We have a tradition of doing at least one mat that when seated at the dining table. These short silly stories are a great way to interact with each other and a fun way to teach our children about nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
Speaker 12:
It all started when I began working next to this beautiful national library, and inside there was this really lovely children's library that just caught my eye and I thought why not bring my twin girls there on Saturdays when they were just three years old? I'm sure they would love it. that's what I thought, and little did I know that that simple suggestion would turn into our most treasured tradition to this day, that it just warms my heart to see their passion for books and their enthusiasm to experience different libraries while enjoying a cozy read at the library cafe.
Speaker 13:
Our family's tradition is to read at night. I have seven children and for the past 33 years, every single night, we read together with our kids. We all cuddle up every evening in our jammies and read a book The sillier the better. I love our tradition of reading because it's created readers and it's helped them learn about the world through the different voices. There's something about knowing that, no matter what's happened during the day, we're all going to cuddle up and have that quiet story time together.
Speaker 14:
Something that can be considered a tradition that we do be our trips to Seaside Oregon. Really enjoy ourselves down there just connecting with one another in nature and disconnecting from our cell phones as much as possible. Be grateful for the opportunity to connect with the kids and nature and just be present in those moments.
Speaker 1:
Well, friend, i hope you enjoyed hearing those traditions and that it causes you to reflect on the special traditions that you savor in your own life. A big thanks to our panelists who gave their time to come online and record their answers, and if you'd ever like to record an answer to one of our questions, we do that at AdviceColumncom. Forward slash, share my story. So we'd love to include your input on our next episode. But I want to again thank the panelists, and there are links to all of their bios in the description box of the show notes. Thank you for listening to Advice Column Crowdsource Ideas for Living with Intention, and we'll see you in the next episode.