When you think about family traditions, your mind might jump straight to Christmas mornings, birthday cakes and that annual argument about whose turn it is to host.
But some of the best family traditions have absolutely nothing to do with big occasions. Or big spending.
They’re the tiny things that can happen again and again. Pancakes on Sunday mornings. Measuring everyone’s height on the kitchen doorframe. Taking the same ridiculous photo every summer. A specific ‘holiday song’ that gets played loudly in the car when you’re heading to the airport.
They might seem fairly ordinary while they’re happening but give them ten or twenty years and suddenly they’re the things everyone remembers… and still talk about.
It’s not just us saying this either. There’s actually some research behind this too. Studies have linked meaningful family rituals with family cohesion and adolescent wellbeing. Gotta love science.
So, if your family could do with a few traditions of its own, now’s the perfect time to start. And here are some wonderfully simple ideas to kick you off.
Choose a spot and take one photograph there every year.
It could be:
The important part is consistency.
At first, you’ll have two photographs that look almost identical. Then suddenly there will be ten of them and you’ll notice everything that’s changed.
Children get taller. Hairstyles improve, then become questionable again. Pets appear. Teenagers become progressively less enthusiastic about participating.
Those photographs become much more interesting as a collection than they ever were individually.
And unlike trying to get the “perfect” family photograph, this one is allowed to be messy. In fact, messy is better.
Every birthday, ask the birthday person the same handful of questions and write down their answers.
Keep it simple:
A five-year-old might want to become a dinosaur.
An eight-year-old might confidently announce they’re going to be a professional footballer, astronaut and YouTuber simultaneously.
By sixteen, you may receive mostly one-word answers.
Keep them anyway.
Over time, you’ve created a little written record of who they were at every age. Print the answers alongside that year’s birthday photos and you’ve got something far more interesting than another camera roll containing 47 nearly identical pictures of someone blowing out candles.
Create one playlist for your family and add to it over the years.
Everyone gets to choose songs. Add the song you couldn’t stop playing on your summer holiday. The children’s current favourites. The song from someone’s first concert. The one everyone sings (badly) in the car.
You could also make it a birthday tradition and let each person add one new song every year.
There’s a particularly lovely reason for doing this. We all know music can be a powerful trigger for memories. Music-evoked memories can be vivid, detailed and strongly connected with particular people, places and periods of our lives.
In other words, that mildly irritating song your child insists on playing 400 times this summer might one day transport you straight back to this exact stage of family life.
Which almost makes listen number 401 worth it.
Almost.
Sunday pancakes. Friday pizza. Homemade burgers on the first Saturday of every month.
It doesn’t need to be nutritionally groundbreaking or worthy of its own cooking show (there’s enough of them already!). It just needs to happen regularly.
Family meals are actually one of the better researched family routines. Yep; more science! But bare with us, A large umbrella review, that brought together 41 previous reviews, found that frequent family meals were associated with a range of positive outcomes for children and teenagers, including diet, wellbeing and even academic outcomes.
Family connectedness (totally a word) and other factors can of course play a part in these associations too, so it’s not about forcing everyone to sit around a table seven nights a week to get a 9 in GCSE English, but about actually enjoying those meals together, when you have them.
The tradition can be wonderfully undemanding too. Maybe Sunday breakfast is the one morning nobody rushes. Maybe Friday night means everyone chooses a pizza topping. Maybe once a month the children choose dinner, with the understanding that “three packets of biscuits” doesn’t technically constitute a main course.
It’s the repetition that turns an ordinary meal into “our thing”.
Pick one day each year when the children get a little more control than usual.
They choose breakfast. They choose the activity. They choose dinner. They choose the film.
You establish the rules beforehand, obviously. Otherwise you may find yourself eating ice cream at 7am before driving six hours to Alton Towers.
The point isn’t literally saying yes to everything. It’s creating one memorable day when normal family roles loosen slightly and everyone gets to be a bit silly.
Remember to photograph the day too. Years from now, when the kids insist their childhood was spent living under the rule of their incredibly boring parents, you’ll have photographic evidence that you did, occasionally, know how to have fun.
Once a year, everyone writes something for the family to open twelve months later.
Young children can draw pictures instead.
Write about what you’re enjoying, what you’re worried about, what you’re looking forward to and what you think life will look like next year.
You can also add predictions.
Will someone finally learn to ride their bike?
Will Dad still be claiming he’s “going to sort the shed out next weekend”?
Will the toddler still insist that pasta is acceptable without sauce but completely inedible once sauce has touched it?
Seal everything away and open it together the following year.
Then write the next batch.
The first day of something gets photographed all the time.
First day of school. First swimming lesson. First sports day. First day in a new home. The list goes on.
Why not try photographing the last day too?
The last day of primary school. The final match of the season. The last night in an old bedroom before redecorating it. The final day of a family holiday.
Firsts are exciting, but lasts often tell you how much has changed in between.
Print and put the two photographs side by side and you’ll have a tiny before-and-after story without needing to write a word.
Not every tradition needs to be meaningful.
Actually, some of the best ones are completely pointless. Maybe…
Everyone has to wear a homemade paper crown during Sunday lunch on the first weekend of January.
Whoever spots the first Christmas decoration in a shop gets to shout a particular phrase.
Every holiday requires a photo of the family recreating the same terrible pose.
Birthdays begin with someone playing an embarrassingly dramatic song.
Nobody outside your family needs to understand it.
That’s rather the point.
Inside jokes and peculiar little customs help create the feeling that your family has its own history and language.
So embrace the silly ones.
Put an empty jar somewhere everyone can reach, along with scraps of paper and a pen.
Whenever something good, funny or memorable happens, write it down.
“Evie finally rode her bike without stabilisers.”
“Grandad accidentally sent 17 identical WhatsApp messages.”
“We saw dolphins on holiday.”
“Ben lost his first tooth.”
“Everyone got soaked walking home from school and we had hot chocolate.”
Then, on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, empty the jar and read everything together.
You don’t need to record something every day. There is no memory-jar administrator checking compliance.
Just add things whenever you remember.
Take a photograph of the notes before you throw them away, or stick your favourites into a scrap book to look back on in years to come.
Pick a date that matters specifically to your family.
Maybe it’s the day you moved into your home. Or the day you adopted your pet. The date your family took that awesome trip. Or simply an arbitrary day you’ve decided belongs to you.
Do the same thing each year.
Go back to the same café. Have a picnic in the same park. Visit somewhere you all love. Take a family photo.
Traditions don’t need hundreds of years of history behind them. Someone just has to be the person who starts them.
The temptation when starting a family tradition is to make it impressive.
Resist. That. Urge.
If your new tradition requires twelve hours of preparation, coordinated outfits, handcrafted decorations and an Excel spreadsheet, there’s a decent chance it won’t make it to year two. And nor should it.
The best traditions fit easily into family life.
A photograph.
A meal.
A song.
A few handwritten questions.
Something small enough that you keep doing it almost without thinking.
Because the real magic isn’t in what you choose… It’s in repeating it.
One Sunday breakfast doesn’t feel particularly significant. Neither does one photograph on the doorstep or one song played in the car.
But repeat them for ten years and you’ve created something completely different.
You’ve created a family history.
And, conveniently, you’ve taken plenty of photos along the way…
