Good morning! A week ago, I wrote some thoughts on Holidays: Sharing Life’s Unexpected Treasures.
In my post, I spotlighted some photos…and mentioned one special holiday tradition that began in 1979: see photo above.
A couple of days after Thanksgiving, we found this great sculpture over at the local university, and a tradition was born.
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A few years later, we took another photo…I couldn’t find the snapshot, so I took a picture of the framed version from my iPhone…it’s not that great, but you get the idea:
Fast forward to 1991…we tried to take the photo in 1989, set on the five-year intervals, but something went awry with our photographer (not my son that year!), and we couldn’t do it again until 1991:
That was the last one we took of the original four kids! Some grandchildren have tried…here are a couple of them…Fiona and Dominic in 2009:
When my eldest son was here in the summer, we had hopes of recreating a shot of the Original Four…but again, one member of the crew was unavailable.
My second son, Brett, is the “Arbiter of the Tradition,” pushing for a recreation of those special moments. He persisted…but despite his efforts, we were unable to pull it together. Sigh.
Perhaps there are just some moments you cannot recreate…and you just have to find new traditions. Or savor the memories of the old ones.
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Do you have traditions special to your family or group? How do you maintain them?
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SERENDIPITY 
What a fantastic tradition and what a great group of pictures! The pictures are getting harder to schedule as the kids get older but one tradition that seems to have stuck is Christmas PJs. Starting when my oldest was a baby I started buying her a new pair of Christmas-y PJs every year. Once they get a bit older I switched to just ones I thought they’d like and I have been informed that that’s not a tradition that’s going anywhere! I have a feeling at some point I’ll be shipping PJs to where ever they are!
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Thanks, Katherine, and it is definitely harder to schedule photos as time goes by. My oldest has lived in Europe since the mid-nineties, and his visits to the states are not nearly as often as we would like. When one is here, one or more others are not…It’s pretty challenging.
Our group get-togethers after Thanksgiving are short a few people, always, but we’re grateful for whoever can attend.
I love the idea of the Christmas PJs…they sound really adorable, and sometimes we do have to adapt to what our now grown children decide works for them…LOL. Thanks for stopping by.
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What a brilliant set of photos and a wonderful tradition, all the more precious probably because it is rare that you can pull it off.
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Thanks, Cleopatra…the first photo was truly “accidental,” in that a boyfriend snapped the photo on a weekend when we were sad about difficulties with my parents over the Thanksgiving holiday, and even though he and I didn’t stay together very long, what he started became the beginning of something bigger. It symbolized coming together in difficult times….and became a celebration of our family.
The kids really glommed onto the idea of it, probably because of the emotional beginning, and turned it into a fun event.
Too bad we couldn’t do it often or at all anymore. But who knows? Maybe there will be another reunion.
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Fingers crossed for more occasions!
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Definitely! Thanks…
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