Family Traditions. I’m big on them.
And yesterday we kept one of my favorites. Memorial Day.
I know that memorial day means a lot of different things to a lot of different people….and that everyone has their own way of observing it. From breakfasts to BBQ’s and from public gatherings to private prayer.
For my family we annually visit at least 3 different cemeteries (and often more). We caravan with parents, grandparents, and siblings from place to place stopping in between for sodas and lunch. It’s a full day event.
And at every stop we tell and hear the same stories we’ve heard over and over and over again…the one about my great great grandpa who settled this town….the one about my grandpa’s “old maid” aunt who raised all his other aunt’s illegitimate children (a personal favorite)…stories about the great grandmother I’m named after…and the stories of my husband’s grandpa during the war….I’ve heard them all a million times and I never get tired of it. Ever.
As we tell stories we trim the grass around the headstones and scrub and shine them up. And then we leave our flowers and flags and pinwheels….
And then we look for some others that could use some love. This year it’s was Grace’s official job to find any headstones that needed flowers and then to decorate them as well. (Everyone deserves to be remembered.)
Maybe it’s weird that we spend the entire day hanging out in cemeteries, but I love it. It helps me feel tied to my past…where I came from…what brought me to where I am today…those who came before me…and it fills me with gratitude. I want to know, I want to remember AND I want my children to know.
And so we go every year and talk and clean and laugh and cry and take photos of the exact same headstones….because that is what we do. It’s tradition, and like I said earlier, I’m big on family traditions.
-liZ
I LOVE what you choose to do with your family! I have chills. So often I think we have so few “traditions” in our homes. I don’t know if it is the divorce that perpetuates this or not taking the time to make traditions. My mother has a wall of old photos and the stories are wonderful. I have asked for her to record all she knows so I can share that (I get the photos) –I don’t think she has yet. Over time we have established traditions with our girls–just by choosing to do the same thing for a holiday year after year, visiting all their grandparents in MI during the summer year after year, and coming up with new traditions for our girls to perhaps pass on to their children. Your tradition is wonderful–remembering prior generations, acknowledging them by physically going to their site, and showing care for others. I LOVE it!
I love your tradition as we have a similar one. We go to 2 different cemeteries to visit the graves of both sets of my grandparents and this year an aunt who recently passed away. We don’t always tell the stories but we do have various discussions and at one of the cemeteries there are a lot of other relatives there also so we’ve started to connect links together. We always go with my parents, when my sister lived near she joined us, very rarely do we run into other family members. I put flags and usually flowers on all the graves. My husband doesn’t completely understand this tradition but he comes along, after 18 years, he’s used to it.