What are some of your family traditions?

Traditions can mean different things to different people. Sometimes it is a fancy way of saying "I've always done it that way". In my mind a tradition is an activity of some sort that is carried forward from one generation to another, some traditions go on for a hundred years others get abandoned because circumstances change. For example there was a tradition that my parents and grandparents had ( and us too) of sending postcards on holiday.

Postcards were usually photographs of the place that you were visiting but could also be of the comic variety, sort of visual jokes. Now it is virtually impossible to find a postcard and the ability to send visual images immediately through Ipads or smart phones has replaced that tradition. In my own times most of the traditions were centred around such events as Christmas, Easter or Guy Fawkes Day. These would not only determine what you did, when you did it but would include what you ate on what days.

A week or so before Christmas would see the purchase of the Christmas tree and the decoration of the tree and the rooms in our house. Streamers would be either made ( or bought in later years) and Christmas cakes and puddings made beforehand, Christmas dinner would be be either a large roasting Chicken or a Goose or in the 1960s it might be a Turkey. We always kept Christmas day as a family day but on Boxing Day we would join up with my Aunt and Uncle and cousins.

To tell the truth it was a bit heavy going as my parents had no time for Uncle Arthur and my cousins were ten years older than me. Easter we would go to Prestatyn for a visit with my grandmother and Uncle Dick and it seems to me that a Ham was the main meal but Easter Eggs would mysteriously appear at breakfast time on Easter Sunday. Guy Fawkes Day on the 5th November was a traditional country wide celebration and as a family we always either hosted or went to a family friend for a bonfire, fireworks and baked potatoes cooked in the bonfire embers.

After Rhona and I got married we developed our own traditions. Christmas Day still remained very traditional in the food that we ate but also it became a tradition that we would share it with Kate and Sari Junaid and their children, Sarah and Esme. One year it would be hosted by us and the next year by the Junaids. That went on for quite a few years until children grew up and circumstances changed.

Ive just thought of another tradition that started by accident and then became a rule; that is the naming of our children who were all given names that started with the letter J. So Joel, Joanna Julianne and Jennie have tradition to blame for their names!