New Traditions: Redefining Celebrations for Today's Family

I got this book because of the enthusiastic review in Robert Fulghum's "From Beginning to End" and it richly deserves his praise. Susan Lieberman felt the need to give her family a richer emotional life, and found that the conventional holidays and customs didn't satisfy in the context of modern American culture.So for a couple of years she simply asked everyone she met whether they had invented any new family traditions. And she found dozens. She compiled the real experiences of real families -- simple accounts of what worked and what didn't in creating rich, satisfying family circles.The suggestions are amazingly simple, yet endlessly inventive. There's the family that decided they would all (parents & 3 kids) walk the family dog after supper every night. Regardless of weather, out they go; walking in all sorts of different pairings and groupings depending on who has what on their minds to talk about. Or the "you are special" dinner plate which, hokey as it seems, works: it appears as the supper plate of whoever has a success or a birthday or any other reason to be feted by the rest of the family that day.Simple ideas, worked out in real life by real people, to make real lives more resonant. This is a superb book that I'll be giving away as a present to at least 3 other families I can think of, next Christmas.