What are your family traditions? (not christmas)

[Manchestermummax3]

Good morning MN!

This is a question my counsellor has given me. Some major life changes happening shortly (house move, just me & the children). 🏡

She's asked me to think about some new traditions that I might like to incorporate into my new 'home/life'.

Not including Christmas, I’m keen to know what things you do throughout the year or are a regular event in your family?

I'm finding having my own choices still quite challenging! 😔

I have 1 under 5 & 1 over 16 for context. I'm almost 40.

This is a lovely idea. I think you will be given a lot of ideas but my take is that I think traditions should be things that have no pressure associated with them and are also free or very low cost. Otherwise they just feel like another thing that you have to try to keep up with and the feeling of comparisons on social media etc can be tricky. You want your family traditions to be things that you can feel good about rather than a source of stress or pressure or hard to keep up if times are tough financially. Hope that makes sense.

So my ideas would be stuff like putting good luck notes in kids lunchboxes on the first day back to school after summer holiday. Friday evening kitchen disco. Saturday sweetie day (my parents were quite relaxed about sweets and chocolate and we had them quite often but my friends parents were quite strict and they were only allowed sweets on a Saturday. In theory I should have felt like I had the better deal but I was always quite jealous of my friend because they made a special trip to the corner shop on a Saturday to choose their sweets which just felt more special and more of a treat!). Picking blackberries in autumn. Fish and chips whenever you go to the beach. Movie afternoons on Sundays under a blanket.

My favourite tradition from childhood was that we would always have a hot lunch on a Sunday (roast or otherwise) and in the evening we’d have a bath and then come downstairs in PJs and watch Sunday evening tv and have honey on toast. Every Sunday without fail!

I give my children ( now 34 and 31) what we call a "bag of shite" along with their Christmas and birthday presents. It's basically a gift bag filled with all sorts of sweets, snacks etc that they loved growing up. I asked them if I should stop due to my daughter now having children herself but the outcry they made!
They say that it reminds them of the great childhood they had so I'll still be making them when they're in their 60s if I'm still around.

Pizza and popcorn with a film on a Saturday night. We take it in turns to choose the film each week so everyone gets a choice. It's just supermarket pizza and a bag of popcorn so a cheap Saturday night but feels like a treat.

Spa bath Sundays. I run DDs a bubble bath, spa chillout music playing, light a candle, body lotion them afterwards. They're only 8 and 6 but love the chillout time. Obviously you're not going to be applying body lotion to your teenager but they could be encouraged to do that themselves as a bit of self care.

Move night each week, with treats, blankets and no phones!! Each week someone picks a film to watch

Two ice creams a day on holiday and three on a Sunday! When my kids were little my dad used to give them ice cream money with those instructions!

We wait till everyone has sat down to eat dinner together. We all talk at dinner.
All year we collect drink cans and put the deposit money in a jar. The person who guesses the amount gets to chose how to spend the money for the family. We make the guess on the 1 at of January and pop it i on a sticky note to keep in the jar.

Our tooth fairy is terrible. Sometimes it needs letters written to get her to come.
We MacDonald's on the way home if you move up a level in swimming.

We meet a group of people at nature reserve on one particular bank holiday each year. We see them other times but we always do that one.

Pizza Friday, every week, with wine for the grown ups.

On car journeys we either take turns choosing a song, or someone can play their play list for the whole journey depending on how long we're in the car.

On the kids' birthday I buy them a big helium number balloon and bake them a cake of their chosen design/flavour (with guidance to take into account of my abilities. I bake because of food allergies in the family).

Weekly board game night - we take it in turns to choose the game.

We also have Sausage Sandwich Day on 16th of December every year. DS1 was about 3 and we had sausage sandwiches for tea. He said it was the most amazing thing he'd ever eaten, and declared that we had to mark the occasion. He's nearly 14 now, and we've had sausage sandwiches for tea every 16th Dec for a decade!

We used to have Wednesday and Saturday sweeties. My kids knew they'd get a sweetie on those days and not to ask on other days as the answer would be "Is it Wednesday or Saturday?"

They're grown up now and I'm in my 60s but I still have a sweetie on a Wednesday and Saturday.

Oh! We also do the pub legs game on car journeys. You count up how many legs each pub would have (so the Queen Victoria would be two, The White Hart four etc), and keep track of how many you've passed. If it's something like The Smugglers, or The Coach and Horses where it's not specific, you get twelve legs for a group. It's great on long journeys!

I love this and am now wondering if at 35 years old I'm too old to ask my mum to start giving me a "bag of shite" with my presents 😅

The children chose the menu for supper on the last of the holidays - they took it in turns to choose main course and pudding.
For about 10 years without fail it was meat fondue (so we are one of the few families that didn’t choose a fondue set when asked what kitchen item was never used).

We meet up with extended family who live elsewhere in the U.K. every Easter for at least a nice meal together and of course an Easter egg hunt for the kids!

I know you said not Christmas but I take my son to see the Nutcracker ballet every Advent, you could do a theatre or ballet trip at other times of year too of course.

Cake for breakfast on your birthday.

We watch Traitors or Race across the world together and have a family chat with extended family who also watch it in real time going about it on WhatsApp while we watch.

Oh yes when my son was younger we used to do a “Yes Day” on the last Saturday of every month, so he’d say what he wants to do with us (within reason!) and we have to say yes even if he wants ice cream for breakfast or to go to the park at midnight etc. It’s a really fun one!

We have waffle Wednesdays 😃

Eat together, talk, laugh, do something each week together (as simple as a trip to the park with a flask of coffee for you and eldest). Don’t feel pressured to do things rigidly and repeatedly which traditions imply instead have looser guidelines and be flexible.

@CaptainCallisto don’t forget if there are no let’s you get a wicket!

Over the years we have picked up and dropped traditions, depending on age. When they were young we had a special “tea in front of the telly” if they’d achieved something particular at school or with outside interests. Otherwise we’ve always eaten together at the table.

I used to do something called a “mummy mix” on a Sunday which was after their food. I’d get any random bits of chocolate/biscuits etc and put them together in a bowl.

The night before birthdays (even now) we have to say goodbye to whatever age they are and then on waking up on their birthday saying hello to that age.

I love this and I love the fact that if your son goes on to have kids when he is older that it will pass down to them because it’s all he has ever known lol in a few hundred years a family will be sat around on the 16th dec questioning how this day became sausage sandwich day haha

Was meant to quote @CaptainCallistoin my post oops

Some of the traditions that I had when I was a child that I’ve kept with my own children:
Treat from the shop on the way home from school on the last day of every term
Picnic lunch in front of the tv watching the Grand National each year
I always try to do some baking with the dc on Sunday for lunchbox fillers for the forthcoming week e.g. savoury muffins, flapjacks, sausage rolls

Me and DH go on holiday without our kids once a year. We eat kebab and smoke ciggies and drink WKD and all those other blue drinks. It’s so much fun. Sometimes it’s Blackpool or Skegness, but when we have more money we go to a cheap place abroad. This makes us better parents.

I know this is Christmas related but we do advent calendars more than real big gifts. They all have advent calendars with the little pouches and they get trinkets and stuff in there. The elves deliver these, not Santa. We also do pizza Monday, where they make pizza. Pizza Monday is just because I hate Mondays and I like having a pizza to take the edge off, but the kids think I do it for them.

In our house the 'bag of shite' is a treat box. A gift box filled with favorite drinks, sweets, snacks of the birthday person. I've done it for my DDs since they were small and now they also do them for me and their Dad. My girls range form 13 to 29 and they still get excited at their 'treat boxes' each year.
Growing up my Dad always bought sweets home for after tea on a Saturday. Still remember the excitement of seeing what he had chosen each week.
We all choose a horse and watch big races together, Gold Cup, Grand National etc. which is also something we did growing up.

@Stade197 You're never too old for a bag of shite 😅

Sundays are reserved for being in nature. Either a woodland walk, exploring a new place in the countryside we’ve never visited before or visiting some sort of country park/gardens. Occasionally we will finish with a pub lunch but more often we will take a picnic as it’s a weekly thing.

we will do this whatever the weather, and just make sure we are dressed for whatever weather is thrown at us. The lovely thing about a windy or rainy walk is that when we get home we will have hot chocolates to warm up and get cosy again.