SOL 4- Traditions

         As a group, my family has a lot of traditions. Most of these traditions evolved from some strange, unknown past, so here is a brief list of these traditions.

          For example, at Christmas, we have meals at each person's house, and we travel between the houses. This is kind of a massive pain, but at least you get to see everyone. Of course, this means a crap ton of scheduling, as each family needs to make and plan a meal, clean their house, and figure out what times people were coming to the house. I guess the idea of it was that each sector of the family  to do equal cleaning, but other than that I really do not know where this tradition came from.

          A family tradition that just includes my direct family is what we call pizza and a movie night. Basically, every Friday night, I join my mother, father, and sister, at our TV and we all eat pizza, or occasionally a normal dinner, and watch a movie. Just last Friday we watched Wonder. Basically it keeps us up to date with movies we want to see and is something we can do every week with the four of us. This tradition came from my childhood where my parents could introduce movies, especially Disney  movies, to the young versions of my sister and I. This tradition has been around for as long as I can remember. Originally, my parents had my sister and I sit on the floor while we ate, instead of with them. I still remember the day when they let us sit with them on the highly exalted basement couch. We still don't know why we were originally sequestered to the floor, but it certainly made for some fun memories.

          This one is not quite a tradition, but every time a new traveling exhibit opens at DMNS our entire family goes and sees it, at some point during its run. These aptly named "museum days" always turn into a massive day long trip where we look at every exhibit in the building. Everyone in my family loves the museum, so it is a fun day that everyone looks forward to. This tradition does not have a specific beginning that any of us can locate, but it just evolved from all of our loves of museums.

          This tradition is a lot more common between most families than the other ones. On most, if not all, big holidays, like Easter and Christmas, everyone in my family goes to church. My close family and my grandparents go to the same church every  Sunday, but in many ways it is a tradition that everyone shows up to church on these special holidays.

          My grandparents own a condo in vail, and for a long time there would be a week in August where everyone would go up to the condo and spend time together shopping and exploring, but never skiing. This tradition has not been upheld recently because of how hard it is to schedule around that many people's jobs, as my cousins now have jobs. My inner family still makes time to go to Vail once a year, but it rarely happens where everyone makes it.

          Other than these distinct traditions, my family just gets together as a group and is rather close. I don't know if all of these technically count as traditions, but they are all things that my family does together as a large group.