What Are Your Favorite Family Traditions?
Honoring family traditions is important to kids and grown-ups across backgrounds and cultures. Sharing special traditions can strengthen family bonds and create a sense of belonging to children and grown-ups. Traditions can help us connect with cultural or religious roots. They are often shared and passed on to others — sometimes through generations.
Family traditions can include activities, recipes, and acts of kindness, and they can be done at any time to celebrate anything! Want to start a new tradition with your family? Make it simple and not stressful. Your new tradition can be daily, weekly, monthly, or set for special holidays. Involve your kids in making family traditions and then share them with other family members.
Some small traditions you can start with your family are:
Families from the “Celebrating Family” episode of “PBS KIDS Talk About” video series shared their favorite family traditions. Here’s what they told us:
Monica Asante-Muhammad, parent: “In February … we do Love Day. We bake cookies for the community and send them nice letters. We tell them how much they mean to us, and how thankful we are for our community. It’s really special.”
Diego Roos, child: “[My favorite tradition we do as a family is] probably go bowling. Because every New Year’s Day, we go bowling, which I really love.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic started, one family decided to create their own cooking show. Zane Fleming-Puryear, child: “[It’s special to cook together as a family] because we get to spend a lot of time together. And I have a lot of fun just tasting and editing.”
Ryan Parker, parent: “The reason that I love service projects is that we did a lot of service in my family growing up. That was something that really was meaningful to me, and it helped me to learn to think about other people, and I really wanted to continue that tradition in our family.”
Paola Roos, parent: “We celebrate Christmas in our family. But we do it the way [you do it in] Latin America. What we do on the 24th, at midnight, we open all the presents instead of waiting for the 25th … And then we have hot chocolate.”
Perla Santos, grandparent: “I really love to make halo-halo for [my granddaughter]. It's shaved ice with a lot of sweet things like red beans, sweet potatoes, sweet bananas. And we put some ice cream on top and leche flan and ube. It's ube halaya on top of it. And then we spread condensed milk or milk over it, and then you just eat it.”
Roel Santos, parent: “It's important that we share our traditions and keep them going because it connects us. It connects your grandma to her grandma. It connects you to your kids in the future. If we're all doing the same things, then we kind of remember our family and remember our elders and it keeps us ... It's what makes us a family.”
Michela Zanini, child: “There's this Italian holiday called Befana that's 10 days after Christmas … I also want to pass this down to my kids because it's really cool what we do. It's kind of cool. We're different and I want my kids to be that way, to celebrate Befana, Carnivale and all those other holidays.”
Valerio Zanini, parent: “I came here [to] the States by myself. My family, friends, everybody is back in Italy. For me, the main thing is some of these Italian traditions that I grew up with, it feels like a little bit of home. And I'm proud. I'm happy that my kids also see the experience so that you can understand both worlds. The world in America and also the world in Italy. I think that's very important to me.”
James Jean-Pierre, parent: [An important tradition is] January 1st, which, January 1st, 1804, is Haiti's independence day. [We eat] Pumpkin soup. It's called soup joumou … The slaves were never able to eat the soup. And so in a celebratory fashion, they started making the soup on the independence day to celebrate the freedom. The soup is really interesting… [It has] pumpkin, radish, potatoes, yams, carrots, celery, [and] you can put all sorts of meat in it.”
Walter Jenkins, grandparent: “Family is basically our base we grow from. It’s our core. It’s what keeps us going together, and moving, and being successful.”
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The video series shows real parent-child conversations about a wide range of topics.