Keeping Family Tradition Alive - Part 2

Keeping Family Tradition Alive-Part 1

Since the December holiday of 2004, every year my children and I bake Christmas cookies, especially the gingerbread boys, and decorate them with royal icing. The picture on the left is the very first Christmas cookies baking we did. We often invited their friends to add in to the fun, and share the cookies with our neighbors and friends. My children consider such time precious. I enjoyed how they applied themselves in the process. We had gingerbread boys and girls in swim wears, ties, dresses, and sun-glasses. We had one legged gingerbread boy, Pochahanta gingerbread girl, Tarzan and many more. When my daughter was asked to submit a story about her family tradition for a competition, she chose to write about the Christmas cookie baking tradition.

In the years past, we usually had people in mind who we want to give the cookies too. The first year it was the teachers at Pat's Schoolhouse, Claymore, where I used to work and also their former kindergarten. By then, I had stopped working for one year, and they had not been there since. This year, I intend to give out the cookies to the children who sing in the choir at GKY Singapore. There are nine of them, and I thought the rest could be shared with other children who come. Sadly, for the first time after fours year of cookies making, they are not interested anymore. As with the day of Christmas tree trimming, they were busy playing games or chatting with friends. I ended up decorating all the cookies myself.

I believe it is not the last family tradition that they want to shun occasionally -at least I am still hoping that this year is just an exception. I promise myself to keep my cool. At least for now, I can still take comfort that they value having family dinner together. They are so riled when their father is still on the phone after I make the final call for dinner, and he said, "You guys go ahead and eat first." They'd much rather that we are all at the table from the start.