Lesson Eight: Not Everything Needs To Be A Message

We have spent an extremely lazy few days after the holidays. We have all slept in, stayed in our pajamas for way too long, read and watched endless movies.
The girls must have received at least a dozen  new movies for Christmas so they are perfectly content to sit and watch them for hours. I don't always join them (I can only watch so much teen angst), but did decide to sit down with them when they watched the Pixar movie "UP". I had seen the previews for this movie of course, but we had never seen it in the theatres and I sat down with the expectation that it would be a cute but brainless animated movie.

To my surprise, I found it to be a heartbreaking movie about a man who promises his wife adventure and through the course of their life, never gets to do that "big" adventure. As he looks back on his life, he feels like he failed by letting his opportunities pass him by.

Along comes a little boy scout into his life who needs to help the elderly to earn a patch. I thought this little boy was so sweet because they ended up teaching each other that it isn't necessarily the big adventures in life that count, sometimes it is the small adventures.

I am of course in tears by the end of the movie and ask my girls what they thought of it and what they thought the message was.  "What message?" is the reply I get.

What message?  Are you kidding me?  You know, the message about enjoying every minute and taking every opportunity to have adventures whether they are big or small?  How about the message about not taking for granted the moments that you get to be with your family or friends doing every day things?  Or maybe the message about learning from other people when you think you have nothing to learn from them?  Maybe something about doing things while you can before it's too late??

"Huh.  We didn't get any of that."

Sigh.  I guess there doesn't have to be a message in everything does there?

Lesson Eight:  Not everything needs to be a message

Lesson Six: The Best Traditions Have Room to Grow

I love traditions and this time of year is of course filled with family traditions.  When we had kids, my husband and I looked forward to creating our own traditions with our children.  What we didn't know is how important they would become to the girls.

Every year our holiday season begins on the day after Thanksgiving when I turn on my favorite Christmas CD's, break out paint and paint a holiday scene on our front windows.  This is something that came from my childhood as my dad did it every year.  I have done it every year since my kids were very little.  They both love this tradition and watch eagerly as the pictures come to life each year.  This year, the girls asked if they could paint windows as well.  I gave them their own paint, paintbrushes and some lines for perspective and told them they could have free reign on the back windows.  So this year, we have snowmen on the front windows that I painted, and wreaths and Santa hats on the back windows that the girls painted.

Because we have a hard time getting our entire extended family together on an actual holiday, we started having an open house for my extended family the week before Christmas.  I originally did it for convenience, but it has become tradition and we have been hosting this event for about 10 years now.  Because I have been doing it for so long, we have it down to a science.  We have it on the same day every year (the Sunday before Christmas), we have food catered from the same place each year (I gave up trying to do all of my own cooking), we invite the same people.  The girls look forward to it every year because it is the only time they get to see all of their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins at one time.

This year having been personally impacted by the economy and seeing more and more friends affected by the economy as well, we decided that we would make one small change to our open house and asked everyone to bring a food donation that we could take to our local food bank.  My family came through with flying colors.  There were bags and boxes and stacks of food on our doorstep by the end of the evening.

About halfway through the open house, my oldest daughter snuck out the door to meet up with some friends from the neighborhood and they came knocking on the front door and started singing Christmas carols.  There were about a half a dozen of them and their voices were sweet and pure in the night and my entire family came to the door to watch.  When they finished, they asked if they could take the food donations and add them to donations they had been collecting all week to take to the food bank.

How nice that something that was our tradition (the open house) had enough room to grow into something that will help others (the food donations) and could be enjoyed by so many (the caroling and the painting).

I look forward to expanding other traditions into something that we all enjoy and are proud of.

Lesson Six:  The best traditions have room to grow.