Carving Out Traditions

Mark, Lucy & Gabba hard at work on their pumpkins

Mark and I had a fantastic opportunity to attend a Parenting "fireside" with Richard and Linda Eyre. It was great to be able to go together, and to later talk about the ideas we had and what we thought would work for us and help our little brood.

Hyrum gets into the details

One of the things the Eyres discussed was the power of family traditions. Traditions are the glue that hold us together through good time and bad, and those bonds only get stronger as the years go by.

Lucy looks on while Gabba inspects my efforts (I never did get it done!)

I've thought about it in the past, and I seriously didn't think we had any family traditions. I mean, pretty much everything we do with any regularity involves our plentiful extended family. It didn't seem like we had any traditions that just involved our little bunch.

Yvette just raided the school table during the "gutting of the gourds"

But as Mark and I talked about it, we realized that we do. We have some really good ones, in fact. We always read books in the van whenever we go anywhere as a family. Mark and the kids roughhouse and pillow-fight all the time. We have the built-in traditions of going to Church as a family. We have family prayer every night, with Mark, the kids and I taking turns who says it. We have a tradition of serving those around us. We tuck the kids in each night (even Hyrum! and they won't let us forget it, either.) We actually have a lot of traditions.

Gabriella decided to carve a family of "Pwoosie Wah-wahs" on hers...whatever those are

Right now, we're working on being more consistent in the tradition of Family Home Evening. We've been hit-an-miss in the past, but I'm staring down the barrel of raising teenagers here in the next couple of years, and we need all the solidifying, unifying family glue we can get.

Yvette watches as Hyrum works on the gourd he named Scarface

One of the things that the Eyers said about traditions is that you can never have too many, and you should "formalize" them by writing them down in a book. You can have daily traditions, weekly traditions, monthly ones, seasonal ones, birthday ones, annual ones...whatever. So, I'm thinking I should be looking for more reasons to start a traditions.

Lucy did her pumpkin all on her own, without any help. We were really impressed with her perseverance.

Of course, there are the ones that everyone does (or the ones that everyone thinks that every one else is doing, but that we're all too busy to get to, even though we want to, and we have fond memories of doing them when we were young....) The truth is, we've only carved pumpkins as a family a couple of times. I have a strong anti-mainstream streak in me, and pumpkin-carving seemed so...trite. Besides, it seemed a bit much to plunk down the cash for big, cool pumpkins, only to hack them out, light them up, and toss them on the compost pile a couple of days later.

Mark's Cyclops pumpkin

But, I have five children, and they should not have to suffer from my laziness or my cynicism or my tightwad-ity. So, this year, we spent the Monday afternoon before Halloween at the pumpkin farm, picking out our carving victims. Yes, Wal-Mart is cheaper, but the good ones were all gone by then; besides, if you're going for tradition, local pumpkin farms have a lot more ambiance than Wal-Mart or Food-4-Less, right?

Mark and Eliza pose for the shameless photo op

So, I am now a woman with a mission: we are going to carve out fun and joy and time for our family. We are going to start (and maintain!) new traditions, both goofy and meaningful. We are going to be strong and unified. We will do the little ones and the big ones.

The Pumpkin Group: (l-r) Mark's Cyclops, Lucy's 4-eyed monster, Yvy's (carved by mommy) on top, Hyrum's "Calvin & Hobbes"-esque carving, Eliza's (carved by mommy) on top, Amber's "Cinderella Coach", two uncarved pumpkins - we had more pumpkins than people - Hyrum's "Scarface", Gabriella's Pwoosie Wah-wah pumpkin