I didn’t have a lot of traditions and rituals in mind when I became a parent. Holidays and the lot, sure. But I don’t know that I had anything in mind apart what might come marked on calendars.
One surfaced in our first weeks as a family, though.
Every Friday, we order pizza and watch a movie. Which movie is on a choice rotation from oldest to youngest. The pizza is almost always Papa Murphy’s. (Every Friday, $5 large thin crust cheese, sausage, or pepperoni pizzas!) And, the movies can be television shows, holiday specials, or pieces of a few things until the chooser finds just the right film.
I’ve seen Season 2 Episode 2 of Netflix’s Ultimate Beastmaster more times than I can count. Same for Disney’s Zombies and Zombies 2.
Part of the fun of Friday Movie Night is its transgression against one of our other rituals – dinner together at the dinner table. Quite a little bit of research speaks to the importance of eating dinner together each night, but it just sort of happened for us.
Stealing from another movie The Story of Us, we take turns each night sharing our “high” and “low” from the day. Right now, it’s a lot of modeling from me. We also learned in our first couple goes that someone naming you in their description of their low for the day was not that person trying to make you feel bad or pick on you.
Many nights, the kids say they don’t have a low. Then I share mine, and they say, “Oh, that’s my low too.” This happens even if my low was about something that happened at work. I know what’s going on developmentally, so I never comment on it.
I know, if I let things develop organically, when we enter adolescence, this piece of ritual will give me some rare glimpses into their lives.
It’s also why the transgression of Family Movie Night is so important to us. We get to eat DOWNSTAIRS! We watch TV while we eat. We get to stay up late, though one of us tends to be zonked about 45 minutes in.
When we have visitors on Fridays (which used to be a thing), the kids are excited to welcome them into our tradition. It’s special for us, so it will clearly be special for our guests. It’s a testament to my friends that they’ve stuck out some pretty heinous choices.
In both these cases, it has struck me how easily these rituals came into being. No special forethought to get them started, no real planning. How easy these little things became big and important parts of who we are.