Family Traditions

When thinking back to my family history, its hard to know much about it. My family is so big and I have not even met everyone. I have so many cousins and great aunts and uncles. I have met many of these people but not all. I have over 30 cousins. I know a lot of my great uncles were in the service. A lot of them were in the Vietnam War and World War II, even though I don’t know a lot about our family history there are a lot of family traditions we continue to keep from past lineage that continue to get passed down. Holiday traditions are each set out my aunt and uncles and grandparents and my parents all host a different holiday. The same people host the same holiday every year. We eat the same foods at each holiday and the same people bring or make the same thing. Next, these are all traditions my family has used for years that were passed down from their parents and family. This is a very casual non traditional style. Some people sit at the table and others sit in the living room, you don’t have to wait for everyone before you can eat. On the other side of my family is a different story. We do kind of the same thing for holidays but my aunt and uncle host all of them and they always cook because they always make a different culture of food every time. My aunt and uncle adopted a daughter from China when she was younger and they travel all across the world all the time so they always bring back a new recipe of some sort to share. We have everything from real Chinese food to Thai, Japanese to Asian. If the food is not from a different country, it’s from another state. They have lived all over the United States so they have tons of all different kinds of food to bring to the table. Then, this is a much more traditional or proper style. We have to eat with our napkins on our lap, no elbows on the table, you must wait for everyone to be served before you can start eating, you do a cheers before you eat and you have to wait to get up from the table until everyone is done eating. It is very different on each side of the family and very interesting how different each sides’ traditions are. When mixing the two sides with family birthday parties, or summer family BBQ’s or other get togethers it can always be interesting to see how they mix. It ends up kind of being a mixture of both family traditions. Doing some of one side of the family’s traditions and doing some of the other sides’, family traditions. It can also be interesting to see how they react with one another. My family gets along really well, but mixing can also be interesting. These family traditions have been around forever on each side. They are all traditions that have gotten passed down from each of the generations and its cool that they are still being continued from past generations and how they have been instilled in all of us kids and everyone. It can also be hard because anyone who marries into the family can be thrown into our families’ traditions which might be very different from theirs. Mixing the different traditions gets super interesting especially when they have kids cause if both of their parents families have different traditions it can make it difficult. It has helped me too because it shows me things I want to continue with and things I don’t want to when i’m older and have a family. I can mix a little bit of things from both sides of things I like. It is also cool to see other families traditions and things they do and how different peoples’ traditions are or how similar traditions are. Finally, It can also be hard when it comes to food as well because the side of my family that makes all the food from different cultures and stuff usually bring their own food to eat and share and to go along with the food that is already made. My other side of the family does not really like food from other cultures or things. They always try it but they don’t ever venture from the American food. Some like a mixture of both so it works out good. Overall, my family can be both very traditional and very non traditional. We have such a huge family so it can be hard to nearly impossible to get everyone together, but when we do it is so nice.

Photo by revger on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA