The other day I wrote about how my teenagers still love to peruse the toy catalogs that come in the mail and the newspaper during this time of year, as the sun comes out on this frosty Thanksgiving morning and starts to melt away all the frost and ice, my kids and I have flipped on the television to rally around the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. This is one of those few bonding traditions that has somehow survived the years and changes and we can still manage to agree on the parade for a few hours on Thanksgiving Day.
Traditions can be so strange and fickle. Those that we cling to the hardest can be among the first to go as the kids grow up. The parade, however, has always been an easy, no-stress sort of tradition. We just snuggle down in our pjs and blankets with coffee, tea or cocoa and read over the fat Thanksgiving newspaper while we watch. When the kids were younger, they would have their toys or snuggle in with me on the couch. Since we are a family who has a late dinner, there has never been any pressure for me to get stuck in the kitchen and I can linger over the parade too.
I love knowing that we are joining millions of other families of all sorts as we settle around the parade and it has always given us a reprieve from the stress, tension, disagreements, hormones, whatever the daily trials happened to be at the time. It also is one of those accidental traditions that helps us to put a timeline to our lives: “remember the year when?” conversations come up as we pontificate and comment and enjoy each other’s company. As anyone with a bustling family knows, it isn’t always easy to find those activities that everyone can enjoy on their own terms…together.