Make Your Home a Haven From the World - Day 16

(Norman Rockwell - Thanksgiving Dinner)

Family traditions definitely make a home feel like heaven.  You know, all those fun things you get to do with your family, the things you look forward to...  For example, every Friday night we do pizza and movie night.  The tradition started for us over six years ago.  My husband was away from home doing some training for his job for about five months, but he got to come home every weekend.  So to celebrate having him home, we started having pizza every Friday night.  Then we'd eat treats and watch a movie.  To this day, we still do this and it's the perfect fun start to the weekend.  

We also have holiday traditions.  Like... we buy a REAL Christmas tree every year and we hunt for it together as a family, the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving.  We watch "White Christmas"  every year while we decorate the tree.  For Thanksgiving, it's usually just our family, but the tradition is to make a whole weekend worth of Thanksgiving food so that we can have left overs for days!  This way we don't have to cook for the next four days and can just enjoy the holiday weekend.  

We created a new tradition a couple of years ago to go camping at the same place every July.  We ride horses, go fishing, roast marshmallows and Star Bursts.  It's tons of fun.  

Traditions don't have to be based around holidays though, just like how I mentioned that we eat pizza for dinner every Friday night, we also do chores around the house every Saturday morning.  We read scriptures as a family every morning before we leave the house.  We go around the table at dinner time and share two things that we're grateful for (Usually.  Sometimes we forget.)  Traditions are just things you do all the time together.  Routines.

I think traditions bond family members together.  They create lasting memories and a feeling of family unity.  That bonding, that family unity, those memories, they make those walls that surround you and your family, feel like heaven on earth!

*This is a 31 days series:  Make Your Home a Haven From the World.  I will be writing on this topic every day for the month of October.  Click on the link on the sidebar to read the previous day(s) posts.