In our home, December offers a great pause. Few responsibilities are doled out, save for the finding of a missing puzzle piece, candying the pecans, raveling the yarn ball back into its basket. We read poetry and scripture daily, adding in a beloved picture book from years passed. We work with our hands, topping peg dolls with acorn hats, melting peppermints into waxed stars, crafting salt dough nativities and cutting all manner of paper snow for window adornment. Our children are busy little elves all morning, their mother scattering surprises and whimsy into afternoon calendar squares: Today, a snowy hike! Tomorrow, a play! Thursday, a chocolate shoppe tour!
It can sometimes seem like work to create such whimsy, but only when I forget the plot. In those moments, I bring a single guiding principle into sharper focus: What do I want Christmas to feel like? (I have, in the past, gotten this wrong in favor of a different question: What do I want Christmas to look like?) The answer never steers me wrong, and often results in a forgoing of some age-old tradition in favor of rest, or togetherness, or love.
And so: ice-skating is swapped for a cozy night indoors, clove cider in a stockpot, cedar on the hearth.
As such, December is often a month that brings immense reflection: What will my children say of their childhood? What rhythms and traditions will be remembered in our home? Which labors will draw fruit? Which habits will be lost, which tales forgotten, which learnings unlearned?
I will forever be curious about rhythms of old, traditions of new. It is not uncommon for me to meet a kindred spirit and ask her to walk me through her day, sparing no details of breakfast recipes and nightstand books and handicrafts practiced. Admittedly, my curiosity is often misguided – in an attempt to share the beauty of one family’s unique cadence, I assume I can borrow a beat or two.
And sometimes, I can. But it is a daunting project to build a strong family culture with a foundation belonging to someone else, and it is easy to forget that tomorrow’s bricks are still but sand. The people in our home – ourselves included – are malleable, changing, being shaped anew. How do you cement still-formless clay? How do you stack bricks from sand? We can’t.
And so, I no longer think of family culture as something to be built (certainly not borrowed). Our homes, and the families residing in them, are not towers to be constructed or fortresses to be established, but languages to be learned. Through rounds of Monopoly, batches of apple crisp, backyard soccer games, we are translating love into a dialect. We are not manufacturing something as much as we are inviting it, allowing it, receiving it. An experience spoken, then shared.
Perhaps, for you, this is the year the navel oranges were dried and strung, the Nutcracker was visited, the ice lanterns frozen and lit, glowing for all. Every tradition a go, check, check, check. Or: perhaps this is the year your kids were sick for a bucket of days and you canceled every festivity imaginable. Perhaps, by all accounts, it was a bummer of a holiday season.
But what did you hear?
In the moments of canceled plans and failed traditions, were your ears tuned to one another? Did you pick up on the song within your walls, the chorus you can harmonize by heart? What language did you speak?
How many inside jokes were told? Or better yet: formed anew?
Sure, you didn’t finish Dickens (again). But when you opened the book, did you ask for someone to hand you your reading glasses, or did you say, “Bring me those Teddy Shoemakers!” reminiscent of your son’s bespectacled character in the Christmas pageant? When you unpacked a few Christmas ornaments, did you call them nutcrackers, or statnuts, in honor of a lispy toddler with mixed-up words? Do you throw a pot roast into the crotch pot, as we do, a fumbled phrase now two-generations deep?
We will not always have our traditions. Our children – or ourselves – will not always be in a season to enjoy button ornaments or Breakfast in Bethlehem. We cannot grant our families the promise of an unwavering itinerary.
But we can give them something far lovelier: a language to carry them into their own.
Your Turn: What phrases or inside jokes are part of your family language? Which might you add going forward?