This year, I thought I'd celebrate the holidays by sharing some of our family traditions with you! So, for the next twelve days, I'll be posting the rituals from both sides of our family and evolved over the years become institutions in our house. So, without further ado, I give you...
...The Christmas Poem!
My Nana (my dad's mom) started this tradition decades ago. I have no idea if she started the year she and my Gramps were married, but each year she pens a rhyme rather than the traditional annual letter or card.
My dad inherited Nana's poetic talents and composed many poems over the years! Invitations to family celebrations, toasts at big family events, a limerick as he walked me down the aisle three years ago...but most famously, his Christmas poem. Each poem included a stanza for every member of the family (including the dog), if we'd moved and where, major vacations we'd taken, and any other important events over the last year. Dad always closed the poem with three traditional stanzas: one reminding people the real reason for the holiday, one praying for the troops overseas and away from their families, and one wishing everyone a happy and healthy new year.
So, when I graduated from college and was off on my own, I followed in Dad's footsteps. Except my poem is always in the form of an Irish limerick (Dad's was sometimes, but if he couldn't get it to work just right, he'd use another form of a four or five-line stanza). I include the same traditional verses Dad did, trying to incorporate the year into the rhyme. I print the poem on pretty Christmas computer paper. I use Christmas stamps. And each year I print out an extra poem and place it in a scrapbook dedicated solely to Christmas Poems.
This year, I'll incorporate a new tradition into the mix. This year, the scrapbook page will include pictures of our son with Santa and a picture of him on Christmas morning alongside the poem. It was something my mom always wanted to go back and do with her own Christmas Poem Scrapbook (that my grandma made as a gift to my dad several years ago) but that we were unable to do since the photos were always glued into some other book or lost in a dusty shoebox on a closet shelf somewhere...
No comments:
Post a Comment