Holiday traditions help anchor family gatherings for generations. Today we want to share some lost Christmas traditions to try with your grands. If you start googling in search of something old, but new to you, you’ll find some fun and interesting things to test. You’ll also find some that I’m sure, like me, you’re glad slipped into the pages of history.
Here’s a blog post by Tracey Besemer at Rural Sprout that I thought has some fun info and ideas worth trying. My favorites were: wassailing, hiding the pickle ornament, and writing short poems to go with packages.
One I’d like to try with my Grands for gift giving is writing short poems. Since the age groups are spread out, it might be helpful to provide a short poem structure with fill-in-the-blank spaces to help them learn the process. Remember the stories we did as children in school where we filled in verbs or other details to create a unique story from a prewritten piece with blanks? Same idea but with a holiday-themed poem. Larger gift tags could be handmade and the tag itself would become part of the gift. It could be lots of fun to collect the Grands’ poems over the years as they grow.
I’m glad that telling ghost stories as part of the holiday celebration has passed out of vogue. Children are so impressionable that I’ve never been a fan of scary stories, movies, or activities before bedtime. I remember seeing a portion of a movie on television when I was in grade school that included an attack by a crocodile, live-action not a cartoon. That croc haunted my dreams as a child and they still creep me out as an adult. Ghost stories are very likely to cause sleep problems for children and I’m in favor of children sleeping comfortably through the night!
What do you think? Any ideas from Tracey’s list or others you’d like to share with us and the GPAZ community? We’d love to hear about lost Christmas traditions from you. If we get some good ones, we’ll share them in this month’s newsletter!