Tag Archives: holidays

Day 9: Honor our heritage

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We are a MIXED bag at my house.  Husbeau is 100% Italian.  I am 1/4 Welsh, 1/4 Italian and the other half is a mix of Scottish, Irish, Alsatian (I’m gonna call “German” on that one based on the food, words and preferences of my grandmother) and “unknown” because my great-grandmother was a foundling.  So BigGuy is 5/8 Italian and then a bunch of “other European” and Girly is half Guatemalan and half completely unknown.  Her history is very much like my great-grandmother’s except they no longer call those children “foundlings” and they generally don’t grow up in a hospital setting like my great-grandmother did.

So what do we honor today…?  Continue reading Day 9: Honor our heritage →

Day 8: Bodhi Day

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Bodhi Day is actually a Buddhist observance.  It is the day that the Buddha reached enlightenment.  “Bodhi” means  “awakening” and “Buddha” is “the enlightened one”.   “Enlightenment” is the western word for “awakening”.  For Buddhists, meditation is a central component of detaching from this world and trying to really know through personal experience that all things are interconnected and interdependent. That nothing in this world exists independently.   Our family connects deeply to this concept, so we observe Bodhi Day.  Continue reading Day 8: Bodhi Day →

Day 6: St. Nicholas

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St Nicholas by GE MullanMy family has long tried to separate gifts from December 25th.  It. Is. HARD. people. Do you remember my post from last year about the elf?  Well, here we are a year later and Girly is still pretty much all in.  I woke to the squeals of delight and joy a few mornings ago when Husbeau apparently placed our elf.  She’s all in… the tooth fairy, the Halloween fairy (who takes their candy and swaps it out for a toy), some other fantasy characters that escape me at the moment and… Santa.  Continue reading Day 6: St. Nicholas →

Day 5: Why we are special

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Today’s activity is to tell each person in the house why they are special.  I’m sure that when I picked this, I had delusions of grandeur about the accolades I would hear my children give one another.  The reality I suspect I face is that BigGuy will make an earnest attempt to express some Asperger’s-oriented version of what makes someone special and Girly will say that what’s special about BigGuy is that he has the loudest farts. Continue reading Day 5: Why we are special →

Day 3: Bona Dea

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Today is the Roman festival of Bona Dea, a pre-Christian patroness of women that empowered them to do things that were normally restricted to men.  Centuries ago, this would have been a time of cleaning her temple–a place only for women.  For my household, it is a day to tell and listen to stories about the women in our family, past and present.  The stories that make them memorable.  The big events, the small measures, the misconstrued… we talk about them all. Continue reading Day 3: Bona Dea →

Drawing inward…

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And so, the cozy season approaches and Mama is moving in new directions.  With Thanksgiving comes the onset of our family’s Advent traditions.  For Christians, Advent was 40 days in penance, prayer, and fasting to prepare for the baptism of new Christians at the January feast of Epiphany (a celebration of the arrival of the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus).  It is estimated that this changed somewhere around the 6th century and shifted more to the waiting of the coming of Christ (at his birth).

For my family, as Quakers (who overlap significantly with Christians), we use this season carefully to turn inward.  Not in a selfish way.  Actually, in a way that removes a lot of the selfishness and greed and bustle of the season.  A way that preserves the peace and love and reflection and reverence of the season…  Continue reading Drawing inward… →

Transitioning from fiction to reality

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1510386_10152108528344743_883523461_nWhen you’re a new parent, rarely do you give a great deal of thought to things like Santa, the Easter Bunny or Elf on the Shelf and how those illusions will be shattered.  I mean, I guess if “finding out” was traumatic for you, that might cause you to think carefully about this.  I honestly don’t remember what shattered these illusions for me so I didn’t really think much about it.

Until I woke up one day and it REALLY bothered me that I was lying to my kids.  I’m not sure why this bothered me.  Everyone I knew did it.  Safety in numbers, right?  Because if we go down, we all go down together… I think parents live life by that mindset on a LOT of topics.  Like “How wrong could this be if everyone’s doing it?” and “Well, at least if this is wrong, there are SO many people doing it that I won’t be alone.”  But it did bother me.  I didn’t care how many other people were doing it.  Unfortunately, this thought came after my children were well indoctrinated in the fictitious…  Continue reading Transitioning from fiction to reality →