Traditions Tuesday

One of the things I love most about my family is our tendency to create traditions around nearly everything. As my boys were growing up, I felt it was my role as the mother to create a sense of family and nurture activities and memories that were uniquely ours. Traditions to me are things that set us apart from other families, that root my boys in the comfort of home, that provide some constancy and comfort year after year.

Now that I'm dusting off the blog, I think I will spend at least one Tuesday a month talking about traditions, things that we do in our house that help us bond as a family, either around holidays or trips, or just day-to-day things. 

October means Halloween, and that means costumes. And one definite tradition was our home-made costumes. With the exception of a Buzz Lightyear costume (that was actually mostly a year-round cosplay thing before cosplay was cool, though, so we will give it a pass) almost all of the boys' costumes were handmade/assembled. And there were some cool ones over the years. Their creativity always shone through, even if our handiwork in putting them together maybe wasn't perfect. But that was part of the fun. 

Now that the Nerdlet is 13, he's not going trick-or-treating this year, and our tradition seems to have come to an end. I would be more sad about that if we didn't have such great memories of costumes from years gone by. 

And I would also miss it more if we weren't such nerds that we dress up for comic & scifi cons! Thanks to cosplay and it being somewhat socially acceptable to dress up at cons, we can continue our traditions year-round!! 

What was your favorite Halloween costume, as a kid or as a grown-up? 

What are some of your favorite traditions?