Because holidays come every year, they continually bring opportunity to enjoy traditions and renew the sense of fun, camaraderie, and meaning we feel around them. Holidays seem to provide the ideal natural and ongoing opportunity for being together and renewing family ties.
Extended and Intergenerational Family Activities
As you’ve probably noticed from the stories throughout this book, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and other extended family members can have a tremendous positive influence on the family. Many activities lend themselves to larger family involvement, especially major holiday celebrations such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Hanukkah. But almost any family activity can be broadened to include extended family members.
Sense the excitement of these grandparents in organizing special family times:
One of our favorite traditions is our monthly “family time” with the extended family. Once a month we invite our married children and grandchildren to join us and our children still at home for a potluck dinner and evening together. Everyone brings a part of the meal, and we enjoy eating and catching up on what’s happening in everyone’s life. Then we clean up and sit together in the family room. We arrange the chairs in a circle and bring out a big basket of toys for the little ones to play with in the middle while we talk. Someone usually shares a talent. Often we’ll discuss some aspect of our family mission statement or something else that’s important. When the little ones get tired, everyone goes home. It’s a great time to be together and renew relationships.
A couple in their seventies shared this:
We have a tradition of having Sunday dinners at which our daughter (our only child), her husband, and their children still living at home are always guests. Each week we also invite one of the four married grandchildren and their family—the first week of the month, the oldest; the second week, the next; and so on. In this way we are able to talk with each family—to find out how their lives are changing, what their plans and goals are, and how we might be able to help with those plans.
The desire to create this tradition came about thirty years ago when our daughter married and moved thirteen hundred miles away. For a long time our communication was limited to phone conversations and visits a couple of times a year. We often thought how nice it would be if we could have her and her family over to dinner and be of help, particularly when there was illness in the family.
So in our retirement years we moved closer so that we could do just that. Our Sunday dinners have been a tradition for thirteen years now. It brings us enjoyment to be able to serve, to learn about our grandchildren, to see their growth, and to be part of an extended family.
Notice how these families have taken normal family activities—family times and Sunday dinners—and expanded them to include members of their extended and intergenerational families. And think of the memories and the relationships this is building!
Extended and intergenerational family members can be involved in almost everything you do. Over the years, Sandra and I have made it a point to go to our children’s programs, recitals, and sporting events—or whatever individual family members were involved in. We’ve tried to provide a support system from the family to show that we care and that each person in the family is appreciated and loved. We always have an open invitation for anyone in the extended and intergenerational family who can to come to such activities. And Sandra and I often attend the activities that involve our brothers and sisters and their families as well.
Colleen (daughter):
I remember one time in high school, I was in a play—Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I had a small part—“proud-to-be-crowd,” I’d call it. But on opening night my brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles as well as my parents were in the audience. They filled up three rows! The girl who played the lead looked out and said, “I can’t believe this! I’m the lead, and the only one here to see me is my mom. But you have this dinky little part, and your family takes up half the audience!” That extended family support made me feel very important.
We find that with these kinds of intergenerational activities, siblings and cousins usually end up the best of friends. We feel a great sense of strength in and appreciation for the members of our extended and intergenerational families. We firmly believe they go a long way toward reweaving the safety net that’s become unraveled in society.
Sean (son):
One of the things I appreciate most about our family is this huge intergenerational support network. My kids are growing up very close to their cousins. A lot of them are the same age, and they’re close. They’re the best of friends. And I think this is going to make a tremendous difference when they’re teenagers. They’ll have this huge network of support. And if someone starts having problems, there will probably be too much support to ever let anyone go off the deep end.
Learning Together
There are so many opportunities to learn and do things together as a family! And this can be tremendously renewing in all dimensions.
One tradition that developed when our family went on trips together was singing in the car. That’s the way most of the kids learned the folk songs of America, the campfire songs, patriotic songs (even the verses to The Star-Spangled Banner), Christmas carols, and hit tunes from Broadway musicals. When you think about it, the younger children really need someone to take the time to teach them the words and music to the old familiar songs we all seem to know. Otherwise, how can they join in?
Another way to learn together is to share in a family member’s particular hobby or interest. Get involved in it. Learn about it. Read books. Join associations. Subscribe to magazines. Soak it up. Make it a focus. Talk about it together.
Learning together is socially and mentally renewing. It gives you a shared interest, something fun to talk about. There’s joy in discovering and learning together. It can also be physically renewing when you learn a new sport or a new physical skill, and it can be spiritually renewing when you learn more about the principles that govern in all of life.
Learning together can be a wonderful tradition and one of the greatest joys of family life. It also affirms that when you raise your children you are also raising your grandchildren.
Sean (son):
Our parents took us everywhere. We went with them on trips. Dad took us with him on speaking engagements. We were always exposed to a lot of good things. And I feel this was a real advantage for me. My comfort zone in situations is really high because I’ve experienced a lot. I’ve been camping. I’ve been in the outdoors. I’ve been on survival treks. I’ve been in the water—swimming and waterskiing. I’ve tried every sport at least a few times.
And I consciously try to do that with my kids. If I’m going to a baseball game, I take them. If I’m going to the mall to pick up something, I take them. If I’m going outside to try to build something in the yard, I take them. I’m trying to expose them to a lot of different things in life.
Another vitally important learning tradition is reading. Families can read together. In addition, children need to read on their own—and to see their parents read as well.
A few years ago I was shocked when my son Joshua asked if I ever read. I realized that he had never seen me read. Almost always I read when I am alone. In fact, I cover the equivalent of three or four books every week. But when I am with my family, I am fully with them, and I don’t read.
I have recently read some research which indicates that the number one reason children don’t read is that they don’t see their fathers read.3 I think this is one of the mistakes I have made over the years. I wish that I’d kept my study more open so that my children would have seen me reading more often. And I wish I’d been more conscientious about sharing what I was learning and what excited me.
Sandra:
One learning tradition we developed in our family was that every two weeks I would pile all the kids into the car and we’d go to the public library. Each person was able to get twelve books that could be taken out for two weeks. Each got to choose the books he or she wanted and was interested in.
My main task was to make sure that the books didn’t get mutilated, destroyed, or disappear during this two-week period. I remember my fear as we tried to gather them all up for the day of deliverance.