Are you looking for some inspiration to cultivate meaningful family traditions for the holidays this year?
If so, I have a lovely gift to recommend to you today!
I was pleased to be a contributor to a FREE e-book titled Traditions: a Holiday Collective. This beautiful 80-page book was carefully designed and curated by blogger friend, Sandi Sutton, and includes 21 essays from writers such as Logan Wolfram, Glynnis Whitwer, Natalie Guy, Tara Dickson, Emily Allen, Alexandra Kuykendall, myself, and many others! This free resource is bursting with beautiful writing and creativity that will inspire you to adopt and adapt new traditions for your own family. You’ll even find a few recipes to give you something new to try this holiday season. The Traditions e-book will encourage you to let your traditions serve your family as reminders to both look back at the first coming of Jesus and to look forward to His second coming. Believe me when I tell you, it is a truly beautiful collection of holiday encouragement.
Here’s a snippet from my own contribution, titled “All My Christmases in One Cup,” which comes with a recipe for my mom’s Candy Apple Cider.
“It’s not Christmas until the taste of candied cinnamon burns my tongue with spice and memories.
Though I decorate my home before Thanksgiving and spend weeks celebrating Advent with my church family, part of me waits for the holiday season to round itself out in my parents’ living room. The warmth of the holidays finally fully settles around my shoulders when I arrive at their home in Tennessee and I’m handed a warm cup of the cider of my childhood. It’s not mulled, nor or is it wassail. It’s a hot, sweet drink spiced with cinnamon candy, but it smells like every Christmas that I can remember.
It’s odd how a taste or a smell can do that—dig up a moment you haven’t thought of since the day it happened. The fragrance of my mom’s Candy Apple Cider takes me back to the year I was eight and the electricity went out because of a Christmas Eve thunderstorm; we opened gifts in the dark. Just one sip is required and I’m reminded of the first Christmas my husband and I spent together. Watching the steam rise up from the cup evokes my careful sipping the first time I went home to my parents’ for Christmas with a new baby. Some years there was coffee or spiced tea, but that’s not what we expect when my siblings and I walk through the back door of our parents’ house in December. We expect the cider because there has always been the cider.
I didn’t realize it then, but all the years my mom served the same holiday drink, she was laying a path for our memories. She was providing a simple framework with which to remember our holidays together as a family. It’s not difficult, really, to do the same thing year after year, but it requires intention and restraint. Every holiday season finds me scouring Pinterest and hunting down new traditions I could start with my kids. If I’m not careful, though, all I’m left with is a jumble of mismatched attempts at memory-making that don’t make the cut for next year’s traditions. As I’m raising my boys to focus on Christ during Advent season, I’ve finally settled on a small handful of simple but familiar traditions that I know will be the lattice around which their holiday memories will grow and bloom. I may feel silly working at traditions my young kids don’t seem to care much about now, but I know that when they are adults, the Christmases of their childhood will be encased with the ways I’m determining to help them remember now.”
To continue reading (and to get the recipe!), download your free copy of the Traditions e-book HERE.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.