This year, our very first as a small family of three, I’ve given a lot of thought to the ways I want our family to celebrate, the way I want my son to remember the holiday season. This year, even though he is very very small, I want to start setting the tone and traditions that will become a part of our family. Creating the traditions that our family will come to anticipate, expect, appreciate and remember as the years pass.

I don’t want this season to be about the toys, the gifts, the buying, the consuming. I want this season to be about the love, the quality time, family, friends, giving.

In some ways it feels artificial, to think about and make a conscious decision to make new traditions or continue following old ones. In some ways it feels necessary. In our fast-paced lives I feel like we have forgotten the importance of these traditions, how necessary they are to making us feel stable and grounded. I, certainly, have found myself longing for ritual, a reason to look forward to the holidays that doesn’t involve all the usual things people have come to associate with the word “Christmas” – shopping, credit card debt, overindulgence, waste, busyness.

So, this year we get to decide. With a brand new little guy getting ready to experience his very FIRST christmas, we get to decide how we want it to be. We get to decide which traditions we want to keep from our pasts, which ones we want to try on for size, and which ones we want to keep for future years. Over the next few weeks, I will share with you a few of the traditions that we are establishing as a family, some related to the holidays, some that are just becoming a part of the everyday rhythm of our family. And today, on Thanksgiving, I want to share the first one.

This is our Giving Thanks Jar. It is an idea I got from a recent issue of Mothering magazine in an article titled, “Sustainable Season’s Greetings.”

The jar is on our table with pretty papers and a pen. It is there for everyone, right now just Aaron and I, to jot down things that we are thankful for when the mood strikes. The plan is to put it out beginning Thanksgiving week, a time when we are most reminded of all that we have to be thankful for, and leave it there until the New Year.

I’m hoping that as the days pass, the jar will fill and we will be able to see, very clearly and tangibly, how blessed we are as a family. This year, especially, we have so very many things to be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!