In the weeks and months to come we will experience, pumpkins, costumes,turkeys, candles, trees, candy canes, mangers, fireworks and on and on the list goes. This is a busy time of year. There are lots of opportunities for families to have special times together, but it is also a time when it is easy to crowd your family time out. After all,you have office Christmas parties, and you have guests coming in from out of town, and you have to do all of the cooking for Thanksgiving and all the shopping for … It never ends – so what do you do as a family to make sure these busy days don’t come and go without some meaning to them.

One thing we have found that helps is to establish some traditions. Too often when we think of traditions we think too big. What I mean is, big doesn’t always equate to special. What makes something special,especially traditions, are the participants. We’re going to share some of our traditions. We’d love to hear some of your favorite traditions so we can share them with others. Since its October we’ll start with our annual trip to the pumpkin patch. Each year we have made it a tradition to get our pumpkins at the pumpkin patch. It started when we were in Centralia with only four kids. It’s fun to watch the kids grow up in our pictures from year to year. Almost as important as picking out our pumpkins is eating our caramel apples. In the early days Kelli would actually dipped the apples in the melted caramel. Over the years our caramel apple process has evolved. When Alyse went away to college that first year, out of necessity we discovered apple slices and caramel dip.Alyse was very sad to miss our annual trip. To ease the pain Kelli wanted to somehow include her in our trip. The thought of mailing a caramel apple didn’t sound right, instead Kelli bought a small tub of caramel dip, sliced a couple of apples, and packed a small bag of mini chocolate chips (don’t forget the mini-chocolate chips!!!) and sent Alyse a pumpkin patch care package!

I don’t think it was exactly the same, but I know Alyse appreciated being apart of our family outing, even if it was remotely. Since then a care package always goes out to our kids that are unable to make the pumpkin patch trip. This year only half our kids were available for the adventure, but everyone not present received a text message complete with pictures and the message, “we miss you!” It would be much easier to run down to Safeway and pick out a pumpkin, but we want to make a memory. I know there is some controversy over whether or not we should even recognize Halloween during the month of October – for us we’vetried to focus on the positive aspect of harvest and pumpkins and familytime (oh yeah and caramel apples with mini chocolate chips).