Tagged: Family

Bob Marley on Christmas – It’s Our Tradition

My family isn’t one to really use the word “tradition” to reference our holiday celebrations, but on each holiday the expected ritual is that we  all gather at my grandmother’s house for gift exchanges, my grandmother’s soul food, and my aunts baked from scratch cakes.  We spend the evening playing a game of Scattergories where my Aunt Dorothy will inevitable cheat and have all of her answers ignored and thereby be declared the loser before the game ever begins, followed by the family sitting (some standing as we are a very large family) watching terrible homemade movies that always, always, always ends in laughter.  The older I get the more I am reminded of how my childhood growing up in San Francisco was abundantly rich filled with “traditions” and unwavering relationships.

As my little one is growing up right before my eyes I ask myself this holiday season, what traditions will we create as a family?  What will my little one say of her childhood; how will she complete the sentence, “We always did _____ for the holidays?  The only way to foster traditions are to first create them.  This year we’ll continue with the traditions that started when I was a graduate student dating my hubby, then boyfriend, along with the traditions that came about with the birth of our baby girl, and start new traditions that one day my daughter will say, “As a child we always…”

  • Fixed Thanksgiving dinner so that we’d have leftovers cooked in our own kitchen.
  • Wore festive pajamas for major holidays.
  • Unwrapped 25 books – some handpicked by me at the library, some store-bought.  Mommy would wrap each book and place it under the Christmas tree for me to unwrap each night beginning on December 1st leading up to Christmas day.
  • Listened to Bob Marley, a CD Mommy and Daddy coined “our Christmas music,” while decorating the Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving.
  • Exchanged Christmas stockings on Christmas Eve.
  • Scoured the “Black Friday” ads and got a head start shopping on the morning of  Thanksgiving.
  • Watched Christmas movie classics while sprawled out on the sofa under the handmade quilt “Created with Grandmother’s Love.”
  • Drank hot chocolate topped with marshmallows and a peppermint stick.
  • Mailed Christmas cards to my family and friends.
  • Read the story of Jesus’ birth.
  • Stayed up late on New Year’s Eve dancing, flipping the channels between New York’s Time Square ball drop and Nick Jr’s countdown, eating hors d’oeuvre’s and sipping sparkling apple cider from a plastic champagne flute…fancy!
  • Using my acting chops in the church’s annual Christmas program.
  • Ice skating, or more aptly, falling on the ice, with Mommy and Daddy.
  • Had a never ending playlist of holiday music.

Follow me on Pinterest for holiday tradition ideas.  What traditions will you uphold or create this year?

A Pirate That Quacks Like a Duck

Halloween was never marked on the calendar as a favorite holiday amongst my family.  Instead of dressing up for Halloween as a goblin, monster, or some other ugly beast, I usually dressed up in some watered down costume that preserved the old lie adage that girls are sugar and spice and everything nice.  I was once a snaggletooth Tina Turner and at another point a California raisin. Tell me I wasn’t cool.

Our Halloween tradition included us – by us I’m referring to the majority of my 14 first cousins – being hauled to a church “holiday celebration” or fighting at home over the bags of candy my aunt and grandmother would bring us.

As I type this, my initial thought of posting about how Halloween wasn’t much fun for me until I had my daughter to dress up and laugh at with, has been completely derailed by old fall memories.  Later for my daughter quacking like a duck  although she was clearly a pirate and was prompted to grunt, arrrghhh!  Hence, the title of the post.

So often we type or text, “LOL,” but at this very moment I am literally laughing out loud thinking of the fall seasons when my cousins and I would sit around my grandmother’s kitchen table that was decorated with a vinyl never-quite-season-appropriate tablecloth playing a made up game of “clucking” (the sound the tongue makes when it’s thrusted onto the hard palette of the mouth) or, our favorite Halloween past time: Bingo, the Avery kids edition.

We would take our respective places around Moma’s kitchen table, sliding her “good” chairs from the dining room to the kitchen table to make room for all of my older cousins to sit.  Us younger ones (yes, I am amongst the younger, cuter half of the cousins) would sometimes sit on the lap of one of the older cousins with a large-print Bingo sheet in hand and the aroma of pumpkin seeds and salt and my aunts birthday cake wafting from Moma’s oven.  What established our game of Bingo as “the Avery kids edition” was that we gambled our Halloween candy!!!  Winner takes all.

Pause.

Here’s where I take a break from typing so that I may roar in laughter. (Out loud.)  Feel free to join in at the thought of a bunch of kids ages 7 – 14 gambling at our grandmothers Valentines Day decorated tablecloth on Halloween.

We gambled Butterfingers, Snickers, Jolly Ranchers, Starburst, and when we got really desperate, pennies.  What a group of rascals we were.  We may not have created a fall tradition that included going door to door Trick-or-Treating, but when there’s a group of kids as hilarious and rambunctious as we were who needs Trick-or-Treating?  Every day growing up with my cousins was a treat.  Sometimes a trick, I admit, but even that turned out to be a treat.

I didn’t realize it before today, but fall is a reminder that I need to call my cousins.  Muah Avery bunch!!!