“Can we have Nutella sandwiches this summer like we did last summer?”
Thus began my children’s plea for hazelnut sweetness in the name of tradition. To be clear, the Nutella sandwiches happened out of necessity when we were in Mexico and had limited options that were familiar. Yet, to my kids – they have instantly become a summer tradition
Even if your life is not dominated by the school year, we can all feel the changing season in the air: temps are up, schedules are changing, the sun sets later and later. In France, basically everyone takes off for the month of August. Some stores just close for the month – talk about slowing down! While in the US we don’t slow down that much, there’s just something different about summer.
I think of traditions as most often related to the winter holidays. But summer holds just as many traditions or meaningful memories, too. How many of us hear things like:
“Every summer, my family used to …” or
“On last day of school…” or “Every 4th of July…”
Partly this is because the American summer is so closely associated with childhood. The summer break from school looms large for children all year and offers a blank open canvas on which to create a time apart, a time just begging for traditions. Even for those of us who work through the summer, the energy seems lower, other demands slow down and the long evenings encourage us to linger outside.
I mean, nothing rivals a summer sunset.
Our district’s schools put together what they called a summer toolkit for students – a worksheet that encouraged them to put thought into their summer (as much as they have control over). They had prompts to set self-care goals and unplug goals as well as questions such as Who would you like to see or where would you like to go? and How do you want to feel when you come back to school? I love that they’ve introduced students to these tools of setting goals for themselves for the time away.
What if we all took a step back to think about a new season with purpose and intentionality instead of just letting it happen to us?
Summer gives us a unique opportunity to think purposefully about how we want to approach this time set apart. Do we want to try something new like getting up earlier to have a few moments of quiet by ourselves in the morning? Or take up a new activity or exercise routine? Or return to something we haven’t done in a while? Breathe new life into a summer tradition that means a lot to us?
So honestly, I’m tempted to embrace Nutella sandwiches as a summer tradition. Why not? It’s something we can fairly easily make happen no matter what our other plans are. And, I feel the pull of wanting to create memories and summer traditions for my children. They do, after all, grow up so fast …
Traditions shape us. And they don’t just happen to us, we get a say in what we return to and what we repeat year after year. So let’s come into the summer season with intentionality, even if our schedules don’t change and we’re working the whole time. We still have choices of how we shape our lives and what is so important to us that it’s worth repeating.
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~What I’m reading~
Stories that Stick by Kindra Hall
Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
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Francey,
One of my favorite summer traditions included a trip to Bartlesville with my Grammy Rue where we shopped for summer drinking glasses together. At the beginning of the summer my brother and I would officially move to my grandparents property in rural Ramona. The teacher in Grammy Rue became apparent when she shared the activities she had signed us up for and the trips she had planned to take us on, once we arrived.
At her house, she would show my brother and I our official "quarters", which included the drawers for our clothes, places for our shoes, new board games, and our designated beds with crisp (ironed) sheets which still smelled of ozone from the fresh breeze of the clothesline.
On our first trip to Bartlesville for the summer we would shop for our summer tumblers. With the popularity of iced tea, Kool Aid, milk and ice water, she liked us to identify one favorite drinking glass as our own. We were responsible for keeping up with it all day. We had criteria! Ideally we would find a multicolored set, so we could easily identify our designated beverage. One year we picked a set of those pastel colored aluminum glasses and matching pitcher. Another year we found a clear pitcher and glasses with different colored stripes in retro colors (1956-62. I think I picked the glass with yellow stripes and my brother picked bright green or turquoise. Grammy picked pink because that was her favorite. I liked pink too, but I knew Grammy loved it more than I did, so I left pink for her. We found plastic ones one year that were unbreakable. We didn't have to be as careful not to break them. And unlike the aluminum ones they didn't sweat or freeze our hands. However, the plastic ones were easier to knock over.
Another summer ritual was getting our feet acclimated to going barefoot. That's a process. First you start in the morning by stepping our onto the cement porch. That was usually cold to the touch at that time of day. We would gradually venture onto the grass, and eventually gravel. When we could travel across the gravel road without prancing like a baby doe, we were ready for summer.
Another tradition was to pick our pet horned toad for the summer and create a nice habitat for it. We'd each have to keep a dish of clean water, some flat rocks and plenty of vegetation for eating in our pet's summer home. Sometimes we would have more than one pet each in our two habitats, and we loved playing with them. They were also great listeners for a kid without a dog, and they taught us the importance of caring for a delicate pet. We each gave ours fun names, all of which which escape me now. I do recall my brother naming his baby raccoon Elizabeth one year. (That was not a tradition.)
My grandad would get a new gunny sack or tire for the swing from the big pear tree in the back yard, and add some new boards or a ladder to spruce up the tree house for my brother each summer. He and his friends spent lots of time up there. They liked to throw green or rotten pears down on the girls below from their home-made wooden "tower".
More of a routine than a tradition was avoiding bug bites. We were truly inundated with chiggers in Ramona. To repel them, we had to step in a shallow box of bright yellow sulfur powder and rub it on our legs before going out to play in the yard. I doubt that that method is being practiced today.
Finally, some of my fondest memories of my childhood summers was running through the sheets on the clothesline outside on Saturday morning. The wind and I took turns whipping the sweet-smelling textiles to and fro. The clean fragrance of ozone, a gift from the wind, is still one of my favorite smells on earth!
Nutella sandwiches sound good to me!