52 Week Challenge: Question 10
What were some of the family and holiday traditions that you remember? Ways of celebrating?
Kristin:
I grew up with a lot of traditions. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, my mom is very festive. We celebrated all of the holidays and my mom would decorate for each of them. Just like we all do now. Here are some of the main ones:
New Years: My parents usually threw a big New Years Eve party at our house with their friends. We would get to hang out in their bedroom and watch movies and eat good food. The next morning we would get to eat all the leftovers from their big bash. I used to invite friends over to help us eat all the gourmet food. New Years Day was always the day that we would take down our Christmas tree and all of our Christmas decorations. My mom always would make a big pot of her famous steak soup on New Years Day.
Valentine's Day: When we would get up in the morning on Valentine's Day and would come down for breakfast, my mom would always have cute little gift bags for us with candy and a little surprise. When we lived in the dell everyone there would ding-dong-ditch Valentines and treats at your door. It was always super fun to take all your valentines around and then run home to wait for everyone dropping off your valentines and trying to *catch* them before they could run off.
St. Patrick's Day: My mom would always dye some of our food green. She famously did this once with our milk and some how turned it sour and caused all of us to hate milk from then on. As we got older she would do corned beef and cabbage, beer bread, and some kind of green dessert.
Easter: We weren't a religious family so Easter was all about bunnies, eggs, and chocolate. My mom would always have our house decorated for Easter and would do an elaborate tablescape and Easter lunch. We always got beautiful Easter baskets filled with candy and little gifts. We always dyed eggs and had an Easter egg hunt. Our Easter meal was usually ham, potato salad, baked beans and other sides and a special dessert.
I remember being so excited when I got that Strawberry Shortcake purse in my Easter basket. We are standing in front of our least practical family car. Kelley had to ride on the hump in the back seat and that hump got hot!
Mother's Day: We would always go out for a fancy brunch. Usually at a fancy hotel or ski resort. My siblings and I especially loved the crepe station and the dessert table.
Birthdays: My mom would always cook our favorite dinner and fix whatever we wanted as our *cake*. Sometimes that was pie or dirt and worms pudding. My birthday dinner was always finger steaks with buttermilk ranch dressing, mashed potatoes, and a salad also with ranch dressing. I always wanted my grandma's green punch as my drink (back then my mom and grandma would make it into a slush... I am too lazy to do that now) and I had a brownie mocha torte every year. Sometimes we had birthday parties or slumber parties and sometimes we had family parties and just went to do something fun. My birthday is in June so I had quite a few birthday parties at a park which was fun or even better at the lake!!
Stacey, Kirk, and me with my very favorite brownie mocha torte. I picked it every year!!
Fourth of July Texas Style!! Me, Mom, and Kelley
Kristin as Princess Leia, Stacey as the Easter Bunny, and Kelley as a clown.
(Me as a '50s girl, Kelley as cheetah, and Stacey as Peter Pan all in costumes made by my mom)
Thanksgiving: My mom always got up very early to start making the feast. We always got up to watch the Macey's Day Parade and the Westminster Dog Show. (My kids still do that.) When we were younger we used to eat in the afternoon. Once we were all in college we started eating after dark and we all prefer Thanksgiving dinner by candlelight. My mom always makes an elaborate menu (now we all help) with all of the traditional dishes that we MUST have and sets a beautiful tablescape. It is always fancy and lovely. Thanksgiving dinner is the one menu that we don't mess with; we stick with what we love and eat it year after year. You forget to bring my great-grandma's homemade southern noodles to eat on top of your mashed potatoes with gravy and you are in big trouble. Someone forgets the brussel sprouts...cancel Thanksgiving!! This was the one holiday that we would sometimes travel to the lake to spend it with family.
Decorating Christmas Cookies. My mom is famous for her amazing soft sour cream cut out Christmas cookies with homemade buttercream frosting. The grandkids are her biggest fans and we look pretty excited in this picture too!!
Vacations: We usually went to the lake, some times other places, but mainly the lake. That was the place that we always wanted to get to as fast as we could once school got out for the summer. My parents used to drive us up to Rexburg, Idaho to my Aunt Marji's house and drop us off and we would meet my Grandma and Grandpa Ellersick there and they would take us back to the lake where we would stay for a month during the summer. It was the best! Our parents would drive up at the end of the month, spend a week, and bring us home. Our cousin Tania who lived in Spokane would come out and stay with us too. On rainy days we would come in to Spokane and go to the Garland Theater and Riverfront Park. We thought it was so awesome. It is so funny that I live here now and those are regular activities for my kids.
Riding ponies at Riverfront Park in Spokane while visiting my Grandma and Grandpa Ellersick.
Labor Day, Memorial Day, Spring Break: For these holidays we used to always go somewhere fun. Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, Moab, Arches, Zion, Lake Powell, or Flaming Gorge. Sometimes to Southern Idaho to visit aunts and uncles. We always got to do super fun things on these trips like go river rafting, horseback riding, hiking, and once we went for a helicopter ride. So fun!! Spring break was always spent skiing.
As far as other traditions go...the tooth fairy always came. If we got shots at the doctor's office we always got ice cream afterward. (We do that with our kids too). We always took pictures by our front door on the first day of school. We always got ice cream on the last day of school. My mom for years dressed me and my sisters in a particular color that became our signature color. She would buy three of most things and give each of us the item in our color: I am red, Stacey is green, and Kelley is blue. Somehow Kirk and Jordin escaped this color branding. I am trying to remember what our other traditions were. I know that there were many more but that is all I can think of right now.
Here we are in our signature colors!!
Tyler:
New Years: My family always had particular foods that we would eat on New Years Eve. We would drink sherbet frappe punch and eat special meat filled crescent rolls that my mom would make. We used to always have a movie marathon.
Valentine's Day: We didn't do that much. My mom would always have us make homemade valentines to take to school, never store bought, and we would have our school parties and that was about it.
St. Patrick's Day: The only thing that we would do was wear green that day.
Easter: We always had Easter baskets in the morning and then would attend church. That afternoon we would gather with extended family on my mom's side. We would usually go to my Grandma and Grandpa Kofford's house and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins would come over for a big Easter egg hunt and dinner.
Tyler, Lori, and what is clearly the world's creepiest Easter Bunny.
Fourth of July: We would always attend the Provo Freedom Festival. We would go to the parade and then to the fireworks that night. Some years I was involved in the Stadium of Fire program at BYU with the scouts.
Halloween: I always enjoyed the school Halloween parties. We always dressed up, sometimes our costumes were store bought and sometimes they were homemade. We always went trick-or-treating. Sometimes there were church parties with cake walks and fishponds which were always fun.
Lori, Tyler and Brett
Thanksgiving: We usually gathered with all our Kofford extended family at my Grandma and Grandpa Kofford's house (my mom's parents). My Grandma was famous for her Parker House Rolls. We all loved them. I still make them on Thanksgiving for my family.
Christmas: We always had family parties and gift exchanges with both sides of the family, both the Johnsons and the Koffords, in the month of December. We always had two Christmas trees growing up. A big white flocked tree that was our "fancy" tree that was upstairs in the living room. My mom decorated that tree in all blue. Blue lights and blue ornaments. Downstairs in our family room we always had an artificial green tree that had multi-colored lights and a mix of ornaments. On Christmas Eve we would always bring my Grandma Johnson traditional Norwegian food that she loved. My dad would make lefse and rosettes. We always brought her her favorite lutefisk which is a white gelatinous fish dried in lye and Near Beer. Lutefisk is absolutely disgusting. I don't know how she could eat it; that was probably what the beer was for, to chase it down. After she joined the church it was Near Beer of course. Then it was back to our house to open our Christmas pajamas and one gift of our choosing from under the tree. My mom always made her traditional lemon bread and gumdrop bread. Kris makes my mom's lemon bread for our family now and some years I make gumdrop bread but I am the only one who really likes it. Gumdrop bread is like fruit cake but instead of candied fruit my mom would add gum drops. On Christmas day we would usually visit family or family would come to our house.
Tyler's Mom, Lori, Tyler's Dad, and Tyler in their Christmas Jammies.
Tyler, Lori, and Brett
Birthdays: Our main birthday tradition was using special birthday candles. Our parents bought these birthday candles when we were born and each year we would burn the candle down to the next year. My dad was always having to go and dig them out of storage but we loved them. Sometimes we had friend birthday parties and sometimes we had family parties. My mom always made me my favorite meal for my birthday which was lasagna and ice cream cake. My mom would make what she called her "special ice cream cake"for us. She would crush strawberry and chocolate wafer cookies and put them in the bottom of a big bowl. Then she would layer a few different flavors of softened ice cream into the bowl and refreeze. Then she would thaw it for a bit and remove the ice cream dome from the bowl and that was our ice cream cake.
Tyler, Brett, and Lori and Tyler's infamous birthday candle.
Sunday dinners: Sunday dinners were a big tradition growing up. My mom usually made some kind of roast that would cook while we were at church so that when we came home the house smelled delicious. She most often made baked chicken, roasted potatoes, and homemade rolls. One of our favorite traditions was that, sometimes on a busy Sunday, if we had a bunch of extras meetings or something we would get to go to our food storage and each of us would get to pick out our own bottle of canned fruit. Growing up in Orem with all the orchards we always had a lot of bottled fruit to choose from. Getting your very own jar was a real treat. My favorites were always the pear sauce or peaches. Then we would get to eat our favorite fruit with peanut butter toast. We loved this.
Vacations: We used to go to the Oregon Coast quite a lot when we were kids. That was where my dad was from and we always enjoyed the beach, exploring tide pools, going crabbing and clamming. We also used to go to Kanab, Utah quite a bit when we were younger because my grandparents owned a hotel there before they moved to American Fork, Utah. We used love to spend the night there and go swimming. We went to Disneyland a lot especially when we lived in California. Big family reunions in the summer were also regular traditions and we would travel to wherever they were being held. Our family loved to camp and we would take our tent trailer and head out into the mountains as often as we could for as long as we could. My Dad loved the National Parks especially Yellowstone so that was often a regular trip.
Lori and Tyler at Disneyland
0 comments:
Post a Comment