Traditions

Wow-this year is just buzzing by. I have been a busy bee with all the holidays and traditions that keep popping up. When the kids were really small I didn't fuss too much with all the ins and outs of holiday traditions, but now that I have 3 kids in an age range of 7 to 1 I seem to have a full plate. First we had New Years and Sophie 1st birthday. Next up came Valentines day and all of it's fan fare (see valentines day blog). St. Patty's came with all of it's Leprechaun hunting and green food, and now it's Easters turn to flow into the Cooper house. Easter is a bittersweet holiday for me because when I was a kid I loved it. It wasn't just the Easter baskets that my mom would hide in weird places (the oven was a favorite) or the chocolate bunnies. Easter was a huge family holiday when I was little; Christmas's little sister. We would wake up early and search for the baskets and then go to my Grandmas tiny church.
The majority of my moms family lives in Salt Lake City and I have a ton of cousins, so in the afternoon we would gather at our house or my aunt Irene's to hunt Easter eggs and eat tons of food (usually Mexican). I have so many pictures in my memory of my cousins and I dressed in pastels with little baskets hunting dyed eggs (we started hiding the plastics later in life after one too many rotten eggs were found stinkin' up the joint in June). The reason this is bittersweet for me now as a parent is that my kids really have no cousins. They are the only kids looking for eggs in our yard, the only kids with chocolate smeared faces, and the only kids being forced to eat ham and funeral potatoes. I have one brother and he has no kids-Scott has one sister that will never have kids so our 3 are it, and to me that is sort of depressing.
Scott and I had totally different upbringings. I have like a billion cousins and if given enough time I can name all of them and recall a personal memory that goes along with about 90%. Some of us were very close and some are still total strangers to me. Holidays were spent with lots of kids around that resembled me and tons of aunts and uncles standing around us, patting our heads and feeding us candy. Scott did not have this experience. He has like 12 cousins and if given enough time he can come up with like 7 names and hardly a memory to go along with them. I used to joke that it was a white people thing to not know your family but I could be just stereotyping. For my husband the importance of family being around is well...not that important. Our kids have fabulous grandparents that without any other grandchildren spoil my kids with their attention. They have awesome Godparents and surrogate "aunts and uncles" that are actually of no relation to them, just close friends. Luckily I have also remained very close with my "cousister" Alicia and our kids are each others cousins yet sadly they do not live near us. So this Easter will be like last ones: brunch at the country club (i dislike ham greatly and don't enjoy cooking Easter food), egg hunt at home and bbq'd dinner ala Dad. I will hide the baskets and recite the Easter story as to keep some traditions going.
Someday I will look back on these smaller scale holidays as our own personal traditions, and someday my kids will maybe enjoy a few of them with their families. I guess there comes a time in every parents life when they have to accept that their kids are not going to have the exact same experiences that they had and that it is okay...or I can just pressure my brother into getting married and having kids so mine can have some fun.