To celebrate the rich and imaginative family holiday traditions found in our community, we’ve gathered traditions from our readers and will post one each day until the new year.
We hope you’ll also share one of your favorite holiday traditions and that you’ll find reading about them as comforting and inspiring as we do—
The Thankful Chain
By Alan Durning
We do a thankful chain every year. We start at Thanksgiving and every night (or whenever we feel like it), we each take a strip of construction paper and write on it something we’re thankful for. Then we staple them onto the growing paper chain that stretches around the living room. On or around New Year, we read them aloud. I’ve kept all the strips from years past. It’s fun to see how we’ve changed and remained the same over time. One year, Peter wrote the same thing every time. In the oldest bag, which is from 1999 or so, Kathryn wrote, “I am thankful for teddy bears.”
