Does your family embody an attitude of gratitude? When shaping your family identity, do you actively cultivate and teach the importance of gratitude? One of the many reasons we cherish the holiday season, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, is that it offers a fantastic opportunity to strengthen our family identity through traditions that encourage our family to internalize the virtue of gratitude.

Family Identity with Family Traditions

Family identity is an anchor for you and your children.  It’s what makes us THE HOWARDS.  It reminds us that we have a special Family Community where some of our best memories and treasures of the heart are created.  Growing up, we can remember many wonderful family traditions that our parents created and we still hold them dear.  While it is a treasure of the heart to incorporate those past family traditions from your parents and grandparents, it’s important to create your own family traditions that cultivate your unique family identity.

With Thanksgiving and Christmas fast approaching, now is a perfect opportunity for you and your spouse to intentionally build upon your own family traditions and family identity.  To get your creative juices flowing, here are some of our family traditions that might help you get started:

Thanksgiving Traditions

  • Serve at church, as a family, compiling and distributing Thanksgiving meals.
  • Preparing Operation Christmas Child boxes.
  • Friday after Thanksgiving football game at the high school football field.
  • Movie Marathon (back-to-back movies) at the movie theater.
  • Writing Santa a letter with a wish list (This gave us time to take advantage of Black Friday deals!).

Christmas Traditions

  • Setting up the Christmas train under the Christmas tree
  • Advent calendar with surprises each day – Sometimes a candy, a bible verse, a mini Lego or small toy, treasure hunt to find where we would go to a special dinner or special advent activity, etc…
  • Christmas Card assembly line – stuffing, licking, and placing the stamp!
  • Making and delivering Christmas cookies to our neighbors.
  • Make Jesus a Birthday Cake – it’s His birthday right?!?!

Family Identity with Gratitude

With some of our family traditions listed above, you can see how some of them (i.e. Serving at the church) might inherently incorporate the idea of being grateful for our blessings.  Yet we intentionally took it a step further to create other family traditions that cultivated family identity with gratitude.

Favorite family traditions list – Sometime over the long Thanksgiving break, during a dinner, we would go around the table and each of us would share what their favorite family tradition is (Holiday season or not).  Then our family secretary (Shelly) would write down our responses for that year.  We would then look back at all the previous years and try to guess what each of us said.  This created many hysterical moments when remembering when our 3 and 5 year old mentioned opening toys as their favorite Howard Family Tradition!  Family identity can be reinforced by actually naming the traditions you do.

Thankful list – During a separate dinnertime, we use the same process above, but make several “rounds” naming what we are thankful for.  Having a heartfelt family discussion that recognizes specific blessings from the heart, reinforces family identity and develops gratitude in a very tangible way.

Year in review/Christmas letter – While thoughts of thankfulness and traditions are fresh in our minds, we then, at another dinnertime, begin to list (again using the same above process) all the wonderful and fun things we’ve done during the past year and how we were blessed.  Then after dinner, we would have the boys write our Family Christmas Letter.  Trevor and Alex would each have one side to tell our family and friends what we did over the past year and how we were blessed by it.  There might be a couple of edits and suggestions from Mom and Dad, but it would be genuinely from them and their hearts.  For the younger children, you can have them draw their letter, with mom and dad’s captions below each drawing.

Conversational prayer – With the joy and excitement of Thanksgiving and Christmas, we began to encourage Trevor and Alex to expand their mealtime prayers from “God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food” and “Tick tock, Tick tock,..” to“ Thank you Lord for… and bless… “ In addition to engaging them in this form of worship, it allowed them to verbalize what was in their heart in terms of gratitude and reinforcing our family identity.

Name it, list it, write it, and say it!  This formula may seem obvious for internalizing ideas and concepts, but it serves a meaningful purpose.  Family traditions create lifelong treasures of the heart that define you as a family.  Cultivating the attitude of gratitude sweetens the appreciation for those traditions while creating a heart and mindset towards genuine thankfulness.  And that is a great reminder for mom and dad as well!

Trying to create and add all your family identity, traditions, and gratitude expressions in one season can be overwhelming.  Rather, use this time leading up to Thanksgiving, with your spouse (CouchTime?!), to thoughtfully consider adding one or two new family traditions this year that would focus on developing a heart of gratitude. Creating family traditions and cultivating family identity with gratitude is a process that builds upon itself year after year.

Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.
-Matthew 6:6

Thanksgiving Blessings to you and your family,

Shelly & Rich

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A Special Opportunity To Help Families

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