{ image + recipe }
Since I started this blog, several new mothers have asked for ideas for creating family traditions. I’ve shared some of the traditions our family engages in over the course of a “mom’s year,” but I’d like to scour around for new ideas and get input from you, too. I’m thinking about the best way to do that, but meanwhile I thought I’d share our Sick Day rituals with you since they’re fresh in my mind after Will’s bout with stomach flu last week.
But first. I realized that I used both traditions and rituals in that paragraph. Are they the same thing? Can you bear with me while I have a little fun with etymology?
I think it all starts with customs, which are more like personal habitual practices. A custom becomes tradition (from the Latin tradere, “to hand down”) when it’s passed on to the next generation and the next. So when I think about it, my mother’s custom of reading with a cup of coffee every morning became a tradition when I started reading every morning with a cup of coffee!
Here’s a great little story from Sheri and Bob Stritof that illustrates how a personal custom can become a family tradition:
As a little girl watches her mom prepare the Easter ham, she wonders why her mother cuts off both ends of the ham before putting it in the pot. So she asks why, and her mom realizes that she doesn’t know. That’s the way her mother prepared the Easter ham. So they call Grandmother and pose the question about cutting off the ends of the Easter ham. Grandmother admits to not knowing either. She just prepared the ham the way her mom did it.
Their next call is to Great-Grandmother. When they ask her about her method of preparing the Easter ham, she laughs. Then she says, “It was the only way I could get the Easter ham to fit the small pot I had!”
(I bet we could all come up with things we do, without thinking, just because our parents did them!)
Rituals, on the other hand, are related to rites, which many of us are familiar with because of church (picture a priest or minister preparing Holy Communion). And when you think about it, isn’t there something sacred in the way we care for a sick child or prepare dinner for our families or bathe and read to a child every night before bed?
The beauty of these rituals is that they can make you feel like you’re wrapped in a warm quilt. (And they literally can be a quilt, like the ones we give to new babies in our family.) And perhaps our ritual of snuggling together reading Time for Bed by Mem Fox night after night when he was small is what makes the towering 13-year-old still willing to be called “Mouse”—It’s time for bed, little mouse, little mouse. Darkness is falling all over the house.
Maybe rituals and traditions are just different facets of the same coin. The important thing is that if we take a little time to do them, they can give an extra dose of structure and meaning to our days.
{ The Love Bucket. }
So. When Will came home from school sick last week with a stomach bug, I tucked him into a little nest on the sofa to watch Star Trek videos and put the Love Bucket on the floor next to him, just in case.
Later, we read Alexander and the Magic Mouse by Martha Sanders. This is our sick day book, and the battered copy we read is mine from when I was little. This book is hard to come by these days, so if you see it at an estate sale, snatch it up if you can. With any luck, your library has a copy. Another great choice is A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Erin and Philip Stead. What makes any sick day book special, of course, is that you save it for sick days.
And then when his stomach was up for it, I made Will some toast with butter and cinnamon-sugar sprinkled on top. Because that’s what my mom always made for me when I was sick.
So those are our Sick Day rituals. Is there anything special you do for a sick child that you could share with new moms just starting out? Maybe some music you listen to or a special video you watch together? Or a song you sing?
My favorite ritual that I’ve passed on to my children is apple slices with peanut butter and raisins on top after school. It makes me happy to make it, because I feel a little bit like my mom, who set the bar really high. 🙂
What a sweet memory, Rosa. That made me think of coming home after school when I was little. I have a memory of my mom dancing around the kitchen to the “Monster Mash” (or was it “Splish Splash”?), making brownies.