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Today, on the podcast, we are going to be discussing why traditions are necessary to cultivate your faith, your family, and your well-being. We are going to look at how modernity seemed to downplay the importance of traditions, and how traditions really are vital for our own spiritual and relational growth. We talk about how to start creating traditions today that will build memories that will last a lifetime.

This is Season 1 Episode 17 of the Podcast. I’m Cayce Fletcher, and I’m excited for you to join me as we create a life we love and cultivate our hearts for God.

S2E15 – What You Need to Know about the Christian Creeds – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

In this episode, we are talking about the high-church confessional documents and why you should engage with them. No matter what denomination you belong to, these confessional texts – like Christian creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, and liturgies – have been incredibly influential in the history of the Church. We need to wrestle with what they say and determine how it fits in with our own personal statement of faith. Today, we are going to talk about why you should read these texts, and then, turn our focus to the Christian creeds in particular. Read more on the blog: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-christian-creeds/ Get a PDF copy of the Christian Creeds here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.kit.com/d080819cc1 Get the Doctrine and Theology Cheat Sheet Here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/bd897d28d0 Get a list of the names of God here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/43d2d5cf6b Get a copy of our personal statement of faith creation guide here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/we-believe-your-personal-statement-of-faith-workbook-pdf-download/ Get “Building Our Foundations: 10 Week Study” here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/building-our-foundations-11-week-systematic-theology-book-bible-study/ Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Special Christmas Memories

Every year, after a get-together with good food and lots of fun and laughter, my family would all load up in the van on Christmas Eve. Because all my family lived close by, we would divide up our time around the holidays, visiting my mom’s side on Christmas Eve and my dad’s side on Christmas day. When we would finally say goodbye, we would wrap ourselves in coats and hats and head off into the chilly air of a December night. If the weather was clear, my mom would point up at the sky and say, “Look close. See if you can see Santa’s sleigh!” I would squint and try to find any specks of black amongst the backdrop of twinkling stars.

When we arrived home, strings of lights adorned the porch and roof, up to the tip top of the high gables. Inside, we would bring the magic of light to our living room as we turned on the Christmas Tree before nestling together to open one gift before heading off to bed. Wrapped and placed underneath the tree was a package for me and each of my brothers—Christmas pajamas to wear as we waited for Christmas morning.

Each portion of my time throughout the holidays is a special memory. My life looks very different now, but I cherish each of these memories. Both my parents have passed away, but I wonder how they felt about these times. Did they intentionally plan a magical time? Were they just passing on memories of their own childhoods?

Whatever their reasons, these moments are what I remember from my childhood. The countless hours in school are forgotten. Sports, after-school activities, and piano lessons all blend and mash together. But, I often look back and smile at the times that we created these traditions, these precious memories. I am sure they had a lot on their plate as they wrapped the gifts, made the food, and decorated the house. But, through their work, they created a childhood for me and my brothers that filled us with warmth and love.

Wisdom is something that we are all working towards. Something that should be one of the primary goals of our lives. One of the primary descriptions of wisdom is the fact that it comes with age. “Gray hair is a crown of splendor,” Proverbs 16:31 says. I believe that one reason why wisdom is developed with age is because we begin to see all the events in life through the perspective that is created after years of living. I’ve seen people say that after three kids, numbers stop to really matter. Four, five, six kids are about the same. With each child, you begin to be able to weather some of the ebbs and flows of parenthood with more grace because you’ve been there before. I remember feeling so worried as a new mom of just one. I would check to see if my son was breathing at night multiple times, constantly worried that something would happen. Time went on, and I began to trust in God more. When my daughter was born, I didn’t do that. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my daughter, but I just had the wisdom to see that it would be okay – and that wisdom was created simply by time and experience.

As children, we lack wisdom because of inexperience, hardheartedness, and general foolhardiness. As we grow and get jobs and families of our own, we begin to see the way that our parents acted – whether good or bad – in the experience that we have ourselves. To make the holidays something of value for our family takes an effort that as children we just don’t truly appreciate or recognize the value of.

Traditions make culture. They make a family with fond memories. They make relationships that share not only space and maybe gifts, but also connections built on years and years of faithfulness and consistency.

Traditions are valuable. They are necessary. They are important.

The Demise of the Ancient Ways

I think often about the state of our culture. In college, I took a class on modernism. The sentiment that pervaded most of the literature was the sense of breaking. The old, the ancient, the traditional – it was all broken for better or worse. There was a sense that the future – always described as progress (with undoubtedly positive connotations) – was coming, whether we were ready or not. “The center cannot hold,” wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. In all of this, there was a sense that what got us to the 20th century could not possibly see us out of it. So, we must cast off any residual things that hold us back from a distinctly modern future.

In the aftermath of the 20th century, with wisdom, we see that this is a profoundly untrue statement.

Modernity is the beast described in the second coming, that has brought so many evils to the world, abortion, war, and the Holocaust. Evil upon evil, simply because people thought they could cast off the traditions and morality of the past in order to march into a future they thought would be brighter and better.

But, we know that without Christ, there is no brighter and better. He is the light, and without him, the world lives in darkness. The 20th century and the first decades of this century have been a lesson in how the world lives without the guiding light that comes from Jesus.

We are bumbling about in darkness without him.

We think we know better because of the difference in the standard of living that technology has brought to our lives. Technology has become the god to many, but it is an idol all the same that leads to emptiness and moral decay.

In many ways, the sentiment of modernity was a period of foolhardy adolescence in American culture. Through ‘scientific advancements’ and ‘progress,’ we grew to believe that we knew more than God. We thought we were so profoundly different from the ancients of the past (with their lack of central heating) that we could never learn from them. But, just as teenage tantrums and rebellions fade into middle age growing appreciation for our parents, I think we are at the cusp of a ‘growing up’ in the midst of our culture. A select few are turning away from the hollow promises – the empty calories – of a modern consumerist, materialistic life of impatience and frenetic hurry and activity, and they are turning towards an ‘old-fashioned’ life of quiet habits, purposeful pursuits, and intentional choices that connect them to the roots of the past. They are choosing to listen to the generations that have come before and see the value in their wisdom.

That’s the paradox of the modern age, right? We live off the fruits, wisdom, and insights of the previous thousands of years of generations, and yet, we deem them as backward and stupid because they lived in the past. And so, we cast off anything that ‘holds us back’ from the future. The people of the past are not so different from us. Our modern technology and conveniences have not made us wiser than them, just more entitled and lazy more often than not.

And so let’s turn to the past and see what they have created that gave routine and meaning to their lives. One crucial area was traditions.

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The Benefits of Traditions

The benefits of traditions are manifold. Here are a few:

Traditions create a common culture. Traditions help us to feel connected with each other and with the past. Generally, traditions are tied to times of celebrations, like around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Those celebrations include times of connection through feasting and activities. We pause in our busy lives and connect with those around us. Traditions build time in the schedule where we go back to those old times of living side by side, feasting, and doing life together. Many times, around the holidays, extended family travels to stay with one another. They also help to tie us to the past. We live an uprooted lifestyle. “Family land” is almost unheard of, where families are all in the same place living life day by day. Not only do we feast together with our living family, but we also share the traditions of the past with our children. Traditions make the legacy of your family life stronger as you pass down ‘what your family does’ through the course of a holiday.
Traditions reinforce a cyclical calendar. As I said before, modernity infused life with a sense that progress means always moving forward and always doing something new. But, really, life is full of seasons where we experience the same thing. I often wonder why this is the case. Why did God create a world where seasons are always recurring, where we feel the need to do certain things at the same time every year? Especially in the context of an agrarian society. Sheep lamb in the spring, and the chicks hatch. In the summer, it’s the season of the garden. Fall brings harvest, preserving, butchering, and feasting. And, then you do it all over again. At the same time, you are constantly getting older and trees taller. It’s like the saying, “Same, Same, but Different.” Modernity told us the lie that this cyclical calendar is not true. Factory work has no seasons and often no real sense of night and day. The only goal is to produce more and more, more efficiently. When we look at our homes, our families, our churches, our relationships, things that require routine not efficiency – we often feel defeated because they don’t follow this factory protocol. We need traditions to remind ourselves that we were made for a cyclical calendar, not a factory calendar. We were made for times of feasting, and times of work. For seasons of cold, and of hot. For times of rest, and time of growth. Traditions help us to mark time in this cyclical way.
Traditions are a predictable expectation you can look forward to. Lastly, traditions provide something for our children to look forward to. They expect it. As adults who can sometimes live fairly monotonous lives, ‘predictable expectations’ can seem kind of boring. Maybe even something that we try to avoid. But, children like routine. I was listening to someone explaining the benefits of doing a regular hike on the same trail each week. She said that because the trail was the same, the children were able to grow in their ability to notice and appreciate the surroundings in a way that they couldn’t if they were constantly doing a new trail. Providing predictable experiences helps children to be more confident because they’ve done this before. They know how to do it. And, because of that, they can use their brain power to begin to take in some of the nuances of other parts of the traditions. Traditions provide just the right mix of being different enough to be special and memorable, while also being predictable enough to be used to teach deep lessons about God and life.
Traditions create a sensory, collective story. As I child, I remember playing with a ceramic nativity set. They were breakable, and so I was ever so gentle as I would lay Baby Jesus in a manger with Mary and Joseph watching over them. I would place the wise men in faraway lands and have them travel ever so slowly with camels in tow towards the manger. Angels would appear, shepherds would rejoice, and gifts would be presented. I still remember the cold, slightly scratchy feeling of the figurines and the sound of their tapping as I walked them across the fireplace to the tree skirt where the table was placed. I was only 5. The tradition of setting out a nativity scene underneath a tree created the backdrop of instilling the story of Jesus’ birth into my mind. Through all of the things that we did over the Christmas season, I was cultivating a sense of what it meant to be a Christian. Of the joy and wonder at the birth of our Savior, in a manger surrounded by shepherds watching the true Shepherd of our souls. Through the smell of cookies and evergreen trees, the sounds of Christmas carols and a crackling fire, the sights of lights twinkling and maybe even your favorite Christmas movie, Christmas is a rich sensory experience that combines into a story that gets passed from person to person, parent to child. All traditions can do this.

How to Add Traditions to Your Life

So how do you add the habit of celebrating traditions to your life?

Pick a time of year that lends itself to celebration and story.

For most of you, the time will be pretty self-evident. Generally, our traditions will occur around holidays or the beginning or ending of a season.

Here are some times to celebrate traditions:

Christmas
Easter
Fall
Summer
Beginning of School Year
Ending of School Year
Birthdays

You should think about the story you can teach about this time. What does this time show about God or your family culture? What kind of character traits does it teach? What does it teach us about the world? For some, the story that the tradition tells will be tied to ancient culture. For others, you are writing the story as you are creating the tradition.

Start to brainstorm how to add activities and routines that help you celebrate that time and disciple you and your children.

We all know that Christmas now has become laden with a certain materialistic vibe. Practically every Christmas movie and song is about remembering the ‘reason for the season’ while simultaneously talking about all the gifts they will receive. As you look at the time you chose to add traditions, think about what you are trying to cultivate during this time. For instance, if you chose Christmas, you should try to use this time to celebrate Jesus’ birth and teach yourself and your children why the gift of Christ was necessary, wondrous, and impactful then and now.

Once you determine the purpose of your traditions, then you can figure out how to use traditions to speak to this. If you are trying to teach the story of Christ’s birth on Christmas gathering up stories, nativities, reading the Bible, and singing Christmas carols can be helpful with that. Suppose you are trying to teach the characteristics of love, kindness, and generosity to your family. In that case, you can discuss movies and shows that deal with Christmas and explain the way that the characters did (or did not) show love to one another. Building in time for service and hospitality can help cultivate a sense of community and generosity.

It can be helpful to write down what you have done in the past, maybe as a child, or things you have picked up along the way. For each of the traditions you are already currently doing, be sure to pause and evaluate whether or not the tradition is life-giving and whether the tradition is beneficial. There are definitely traditions that lead you away from God and connection with others and lack a sense of joy.

Then, you have to just do the tradition!

It’s easier said than done though. All too often, we can have great plans to make Memories with our children at the beginning of a season, but then we turn around, and it’s already time to pack away our decorations. Our bucket list doesn’t have one thing marked off and we feel regret and sadness. We don’t feel like it’s Christmas (or fall or Easter, etc.).

If this sounds like you, there are a few things you can do to help make the most of each season that you are in. Once you have brainstormed what you want to do over the course of a season, it’s important to go ahead and make a plan for actually accomplishing that thing. Over the Fall, I had high hopes to go apple picking and visit a sunflower patch and go to Fall festivals and go see the leaves change, and…. I didn’t really do anything of those things. This was because I made a list of “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” And that’s it. I never moved forward. The Fall activities I did, pumpkin picking and decorating, were done because I coordinated with someone else who did the planning for me. For Advent, I changed my plan of attack and I’m actually doing what I wanted to do this season.

How I Do My Advent Calendar

Around the middle of November, I printed out a calendar and wrote down all of the activities we were doing in December. Then, I brainstormed some things I’d like to do. My list looked something like this:

Cookie decorating.
Manger Scene
Christmas programs at church
Christmas lights
Polar Express Day
Twas the Night Before Christmas + PJs
Holiday trees at the park
Advent Calendar

Then, I also made a list of a few other things I was doing this year. I do a Christmas School Preschool which basically means I have a list of Christmas books and carols we sing each day along with a few other school activities. On the Finding Joy in Your Home podcast, I heard of an alternate idea of an advent calendar. Each day of the month, you wrap a present or book (or write down an activity) that you do. Every morning, you unwrap a gift. So, I wrapped Christmas school books, some Christmas DVDs, a few pairs of extra pajamas, and a couple of other things. For one of their activities, we are making doughnuts, so I even wrapped a couple of doughnut pans. I did all of this in November, so now, I just go into my laundry basket of presents to pull out the one numbered for this day. I also wrote down what each gift is on my Christmas calendar.

A couple of notes about this:

(1) I don’t do Elf on the Shelf. So this is like my daily countdown to Christmas.

(2) Wrapping everything before is definitely highly recommended. It’s made daily prep a breeze.

(3) I’m not planning on doing any big gifts on Christmas morning. Instead, I’ve basically spread all their gifts out over the course of a month. I’ve also reinforced the idea that all of these traditions we do are actually ‘gifts’ so me making doughnuts for my son is a gift he should appreciate. That’s their advent calendar for the day.

(4) I wrapped up a few Christmas books that I already had and gave them as the advent calendar for the day. As we start to collect more Christmas books and movies, the idea is that each year I’ll reuse those books while adding in a few new ones till we have a nice collection. I’ve even heard of people wrapping library books to do this. This means you don’t have to spend a lot on Christmas gifts, but the experience is enjoyed for much longer because it’s spread out over the course of a month.

My Christmas Advent calendar is an example of one tradition that is relatively small, a little bit of planning and wrapping and a few minutes each day of unwrapping and reading or doing the activity, but over the month, it has yielded so many benefits.

Other Traditions to Add to Your Life

Some traditions that you could start adding into your life could be:

Christmas Eve Traditions of a Shepherd’s Feast or Feast of the 7 Fishes
New Year’s Eve Traditions – We always eat Chinese Food, do fireworks, and watch the ball drop.
New Year’s Day Traditions – Watching the Rose Parade and eating black-eyed peas and collards.
Lenten traditions, Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter Traditions – From discussing the passion to celebrating with easter eggs or resurrection eggs. We would always do an Easter Basket Scavenger Hunt on the morning before easter. Now, we do a Sunrise Service at church.
Other events in the church year include Ephiphany, Pentecost, St. Nicholas Day, All Saint’s Day, or Reformation Day
You can also celebrate the national holidays of MLK Day, Memorial and Veteran’s Day, Labor Day, and 4th of July. Many of these holidays are just days off from school or work. Pausing to discuss their meaning and history can give much more meaning and richness to each day. It creates a memory.
Sally Clarkson celebrates a family day. On this day, they have breakfast together and celebrate each other by sharing a memory of the past year or sharing how they are proud of each other because of how someone has grown over the years. Then, they hike and have a picnic. They just enjoy one another. Again, something that is small, yet over the years brings memories, expectation, joy, and connection.

If you want more ideas of traditions to add to your holidays or sprinkle throughout the year, you can look at Memory Making Mom by Jessica Smartt and The Life-giving Home by Sally and Sarah Clarkson. Both have wonderful lists of ideas for how to celebrate throughout the year. You can also learn more about the church calendar through Amy Roberts’ guide to Celebrating the church calendar as a protestant.

Traditions help to make our faith stronger. They provide so many opportunities to connect with others. They create memories that will last a lifetime. They are worth all the effort we put into them, as they pass on the legacy of faith to the next generation.

What are some traditions that you are currently cultivating, whether for Advent or a different time in the year? Comment below with what you are doing! I would love to add some new traditions to my year!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and blog and leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts to help others find the show. I’m Cayce Fletcher, and I hope you’ll join me next week for the next episode. Until then, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

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