The holiday season offers many ways for families to spend time together to create lasting memories. These traditions can be in the foods that are shared or a dish that can always be found at the table, activities that families do to get in the holiday spirit, and memories of time spent together.
This year, Maryland SNAP-Ed wants to share some of our childhood traditions and ways that we celebrate the holidays with our families.
Food Traditions
- Making cornbread dressing with biscuits and cornbread.
- Potato pancakes served with applesauce and sour cream, and served with grilled kielbasa.
- Making macaroons to share with friends and family.
- Creating a “theme” each year and everyone brings a dish to share. One year it is Italian, the next year it is Mediterranean.
- A full breakfast (usually an egg bake or waffles and pancakes, breads, fruit salad, etc) as a family at the dining room table and we had to clean up all the dishes BEFORE we could open presents.
- My grandmother, whose parents were from Norway, always made lefsa for the holidays. It's a Norwegian flatbread, sort of like a tortilla, but includes potatoes in the batter. MeeMaw would make the lefsa ahead of time, but before our big family holiday dinner it was the job of the grandkids to prepare the lefsa for eating: spread it with a little soft butter, then sprinkle with a little brown sugar and cinnamon, then roll up. It was served along with our dinner, which always felt a little odd because it was sweet, but what I really remember is sitting with my cousins and siblings and making jokes and laughing as we rolled up what seemed like hundreds of lefsa logs before dinner.
Family Traditions
- At Thanksgiving, even though the children are grown, they still come home to enjoy the Thanksgiving parade on Thanksgiving morning.
- Putting up lights on the house! The kids get to share their “vision” of what they want it to look like and then help hang them. The kids are so excited when the lights are finally turned on for the first time!
- In our family we have a “prized” disco ball apple Christmas ornament. Each year, a child finds it in their ornament box and it is the first ornament put on the tree.
- Our family celebrates Hanukkah by lighting the Hanukkiah (the special menorah for Hanukkah that has 9 candles) at sunset each night and we say a blessing as we light one candle for each night of Hanukkah. We use a "helper" candle called the shamash to light each nightly candle - that's why there are 9 candles in total on a Hanukkiah - the helper candle and one candle for each of the eight nights of Hanukkah. The illuminated Hanukkiah is to be placed near a window so the glow can be shared.
- At Christmas, we always had to wait until everyone woke up to do our stockings and we each did them one at a time!. We also opened one present at a time, with my dad passing them out to people all while wearing a Santa hat.
Share your favorite holiday childhood memories with us! Visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/eatsmartmd to share your favorite memories!
