Did You Have an Elf On the Shelf Tradition? Book Thursday.

Elves. Beads. Christmas trees. Did you have an Elf on the Shelf tradition?

Christbaumkugel Svenska: En typisk julgranskula

Christmas Ornament

Do you remember a favorite Christmas ornament that you put up every year?

I remember that each of my brothers and I had a wire-and-bead, delicate, sparkly ornament that we put on the tree every year. Each of us had a shape that was distinctively ours.

They didn’t make it into my Mom’s things when I unpacked her belongings at my house after her stroke when she was 83.

She had sold her house several years before and down-sized to live in an apartment.

Though she told me she didn’t have my doll, Nancy, anymore either, I found it among her things. Along with all the clothes my grandmother had made for her one visit when I was five.

Which Traditions Are Yours and Which Are Mine?

It was probably this nostalgia for a favorite Christmas ornament that I overlaid on my husband’s green elf.

It had clearly been his since childhood.

I have put it out on a shelf or on the tree every Christmas since we married.

I thought it brought him warm memories of Christmas as a child, and a reliable tradition that tied our family and generations together through the first 12 addresses we lived in the first eight years of our marriage.

This year, however, brought out a different conversation.

We watched the Elf on the Shelf television movie commercials in the run-up to the show the Friday night after Thanksgiving, in keeping with the story’s tradition of putting the elf out the day after Thanksgiving.

“I never had the elf as a Christmas tradition. I’m not sure why we have it.”

“Well, I thought we had it because you used to put it out every year at Christmas when you were growing up.”

“I don’t remember it.”

Which Traditions Are Your Children’s?

So, now the conversation at Christmas will be whether our children remember the elf.

I have faithfully put out the band clothespin ornaments every year, bought to support one son’s band in high school.

Does he care?

Does either son treasure any of our ornaments, collected randomly over the years?

Will the nativity-scene eggs that my grandmother bought me be important to my sons?

The wooden nativity scene we bought in South America?

The wooden nativity puzzle I keep the directions for reassembling to in case a son is not around to put it back together?

The felt ornaments made early in our marriage by a family we still see every year at Christmas, former neighbors of my husband’s when he was a child?

New Traditions

The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition is a sweet story and now, movie on DVD.

Click here to read how a mother and daughter made this television movies themselves, after they self-published the book that took the country by storm.

Is this the year to start a new tradition, putting out the elf in new hiding places regularly to let your grandchildren discover him?

What traditions do you remember around Christmas decorations?

What do your children remember?

Start a conversation this season.

Click here to get these posts regularly in your Reader, with suggestions about how to start writing the stories your grandchildren will want to hear.

To you and the memories you hold for your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, “Granny-Guru”

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

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