Holiday Traditions, Family History

By Elsa McKeithan

Holidays at our house always consist of eating and family time and eating and story telling and eating. Family time means sitting around in the living room playing games, talking, and eating. There’s always music in the background if we aren’t making it ourselves. Friends drop by for hugs and conversation and food.

Gatherings for most families include favorite recipes for food and drink, some of them made only at holidays the way grandma used to make it. For my family I have done the cooking for holidays since I was ten. It became a tradition as soon as I had done it once! At 62 that’s a lot of Christmas turkeys. Actually, we always had turkey for Thanksgiving but often made do with ham for Christmas. Then there were the vegetarian years – but that’s another story.

When I drag out the old, stained cards with my special recipes on them, I remember things that happened on our holidays. I remember making gingerbread men when I was a child, then helping my friends’ children to make them and eventually my own children. I remember hours spent in the kitchen learning from my mother and grandmother, chatting together as women, then making the favorites to honor them even after they passed.
In all cultures, there are important holiday traditions including food and activities. Families have inside jokes and homemade slang that no one else uses. These traditions and stories encode the core of shared experience that holds a family together and makes it special.
One way to get started on a family history is to write about the holidays. What are your special traditions? Do you cook old favorites or compete over new recipes; play football, travel together, stay up all night, volunteer, sing? What makes the holiday truly special for you? What do you wish everyone still remembered?

Why not capture your favorite recipes, memories and a few pictures? Arrange them on a page – this is not too different from arranging canapés on a platter; if you can do one, you can do the other – serve as a gift to all and sundry. Young and old will treasure it; the young for instruction, the venerable for memories.

You don’t happen to be the family matriarch or repository of stories? Interview the family members who remember old times. Do this by phone or a visit well before the holidays. Enlist their aid in creating a special gift for the family this year. People like to help, and older people may really be grateful for a chance to talk with you.

Here are some suggestions for getting started on your memoir or family history:

Arrange your stories around a theme. Recipes are bound to be a hit for holidays. Write down what you remember, what you love about the recipe, who first introduced it to the family, or tips for making it.

Intersperse items about your traditions with the recipes. When and where did your family gather? Did your mother or grandmother always get out the best china? Were there traditional decorations? What did they look like? Candles? Music? Did she make certain foods only for holidays? Tell about the ambiance. How did you feel?

Remember things that happened and write them down. Anything you remember about getting there; for example, the year M almost missed her plane because she was carrying a traditional rainstick (dried cactus with beans inside) and security thought it was a weapon; the Christmas we postponed for three days; the time we drove through a blizzard.
What have you done to carry on the old traditions? Do you always use your grandmother’s favorite pitcher or make a recipe the way an elderly aunt did it? Maybe you have invented new traditions (Anybody else have a New Year’s Fairy?).

Make a family project of rounding up the stories that get told when the family gets together.

Form a small committee with a variety of skills. Photography, typing and computer skills, organizing, listening are all needed. If you have a family artist, enlist that person.

If you want to provide this as an activity for the holiday period, do your homework ahead of time. Have supplies and some ideas and examples ready. Enlist the most outgoing person first, they’ll get others involved.
Have the children decorate the pages with drawings or cutouts. If you are going to copy the book, use designs that are simple and have plenty of contrast.

Catch people in an after dinner talking mood. Turn on your tape recorder and ask some questions – surreptitiously, if necessary.
Add some details to make the story visual; include sounds and tastes and textures for energy in your writing.

Tell the truth – with a little story teller license. Enjoy the results.
Publish your book at your favorite copy center. They make stapled, padded or spiral bound books. Photos can be copied on a special page. Be sure to label photos.

Elsa McKeithan is a writing coach, a working artist and a Story Circle Leader in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her book, Writing the Stories of Your Life; How to Turn Memories into Memoir is available from Trafford.com.