A New Holiday Tradition I’m So Glad I Started

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A lot of families have various holiday traditions, from collecting Christmas ornaments to carol singing or donating to charities, the list is endless. Writer and editor of PopSugar Moms, Kate Schweitzer is no different and began what has become her holiday tradition during her first overseas vacation as an adult many years ago.

Kate was travelling in Ireland when she came across a store selling handcrafted wooden ornaments. “Most were far out of my fresh-out-of-college price range — save for a tiny wooden harp ornament,” she writes. Since that very first purchase, Kate decided to make a tradition out of it, she says “With that, a tradition was born: every destination I’d travel to, I made sure to find an ornament — or at least some trinket on which I could attach a ribbon and hang from a Christmas tree — emblematic of that locale.”

Now ten years later Kate has a Christmas tree filled with reminders of all the amazing places she has visited including a Venetian mask from Italy, a miniature red telephone booth from London and a guitar with real strings from Nashville, to name but a few.

She says “I loved that once a year, I dusted off the box of decorations and trimmed the tree with them, recounting my adventures. My husband soon joined the fold, and we talked about how it’d be so nice to share these stories with our children someday.”

However, as family life took over, Kate and her husband’s tradition of collecting ornaments from their travels slowed down. After speaking with a friend they came up with a new take on her old tradition to incorporate family live and children into the mix. You can read find out more about that by reading her full article here.

 

After reading her piece, I started thinking about Christmas traditions and how I didn’t actually have any personally. However, for the last 20 odd years, my sister and I bought our grandparents a Christmas ornament every year, they would proudly display each new piece each year.

As the years rolled on, our other cousins began to follow suit and they too started buying ornaments in the hope of gaining a coveted spot on the grandparents’ mantelpiece. (A running joke in our family, where only the ‘favorite’ grandchildren’s picture was awarded a spot on the TV or mantelpiece, everyone else was displayed out of immediate sight.)

So with every passing year each new ornament would get “tagged”. My grandmother would write the year she received the gift and who gave it to her on the bottom, so we wouldn’t argue over who gave what.I think Christmas traditions like Kate has written about and even our own little tradition are special. They remind us of times past and each one holds a story or memory.

Christmas aside, I did a lot of travelling over the last ten years and each place I visited I collected a keyring and a postcard from every place, and that too is special to me.

Do you have a similar tradition; is there something you and your family do every year around the holidays? Be sure to let us know.