Combining Holiday and Family Traditions As A New Family

Combining anything is difficult especially if it affects people who have different positions on the subjects. Combining Holiday and family traditions are especially a very tricky.

Traditions are defined as systematic ways a family or organisation may conduct their lives and their business. Traditions are formed based on an inherent need for persons to bond or exist within the parameters of a certain environment.

As with a child entering a new family, that child is expected to embrace the traditions of the new family. Children usually go with the flow, so there is no real danger of upheaval within the new family and by extension are free to continue with their own holiday and family traditions.

However in situations where there is a rift in the home environment children who are split between parents often find it very difficult to adjust. They usually are very opposed to acceptance of one parent or the other’s new traditions.

A balance must be found when dealing with children of separation for children do not understand the fundamentals behind striving to achieve balance.

When I met John all those many years ago, he was estranged from his mother. Somewhere in-between the trauma of divorce, his mother thought it best that he lived with his father. John loved both his parents but living with his dad meant that there would no longer be moms cooking that greeted him, no mom to take him to school or to his extracurricular activities and other things his mom would have done for him.

He was not entirely comfortable with his dad’s new girlfriend and her children, he felt like an outsider! His dad’s girlfriend had brought her new style of parenting and John could not reconcile this new style with what he was accustomed too.

The relationship between John and his dad became strained. John strongly opposed to any directionality this woman offered. Although I was very young in years, I tried to encourage John to give it a chance. Once he did that, he realised it was not all bad; she was not the monster he had made her out to be.

Although she introduced different styles of parenting and traditions into the family, she still had the interest of the household at heart, which also included John’s welfare and wellbeing. Compromise; that is the only way it is possible to combine holiday and family traditions.