Riley Family Traditions

We have the usual traditions in our hoe like getting the tree together at Christmas and Thanksgiving with the relatives but there are some deeper, more urgent ones we truly value and make sure our kids experience throughout the year.

If you have children, what traditions are you trying to instill in them? If you don’t have children, what is a tradition someone passed along to you?

Source: BlogHer Writing Lab December 2015 Prompts | BlogHer

There are a few things my wife and I try to instill in our children as traditions: College and education, celebrating individual triumphs, and traveling. These might be considered more “values” than traditions but the things we do are memories I have of what my parents did and ended up being positive traditions.

We’ve taken our children twice now to Cal State Fullerton to breathe in the atmosphere, get a bite to eat, and walk through spectacles like the multi-tiered library. If you’ve ever been to a University library, you know that smell of books. I want them to have a multi-sensory impression of what college is.

When someone in our family gets a certificate or other form of milestone or recognition, we make a point of going out to eat. I love these memories I have from my childhood. I want my kids to know we are proud of them and thus, we do this tradition in our modern family.

Finally, traveling. We have been so many places with our children: from San Diego to Hawaii, we’re slated to go in June of this year. I also have amazing memories of travel and I want my kids to feel and recognize a broader existence than just their local vicinity. My father told me travel is broadening and I want my kids to feel that breadth of like, traveling somewhere at least once a year. My job as a public school teacher has made this possible since I work only 184 days a year.