Spending Time with Your Family during the Holidays
By Tanya, age 14, Alabama
Help choose one day of the holidays to have a family pizza night! This isn't any ordinary pizza, however. You have to make the pizza from scratch! Each person decides on one topping that they want to use in the pizza. (These can be strange, like cucumbers.) Go shopping for the ingredients together and bake the pizza. The messier, the better!
Over the course of three nights, organize a Board Game Marathon. Be it Monopoly, Poker, or Scrabble, whoever wins at the end of three games gets to decide the dessert for Christmas dinner. Who knew competition was so sweet?!
Let your secrets out! Share one secret or embarrassing event with your family. This helps strengthen family bonds. I speak from experience.
Introduce a scrapbook project for the New Year. Using the pictures from the Pizza Night, Board Game Marathon, and other recent events, start on the first couple of pages of the scrapbook. Over the year 2012, add to your scrapbook and fill it up with sweet memories.
Decide on a New Year's Tradition! A really cool one my family does takes the previous year's calendar, for example, 2011's, and at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, throws it into the garbage can. This is thought by some people to bring luck. Strange, but cool!
Allow yourself some relaxation time. Spending time together isn't always about doing activities. Just talking or having dinner together works too!
Your resolution for the New Year is important. Make a wish with your family or a promise which you will try to keep over the next year. Maybe yours is to spend more time with the family.
Smile, it's school soon! :)
