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Since I grew up in an immigrant family and largely had immigrant children as friends, I didn’t experience many holiday traditions growing up. I never even believed in Santa because I woke up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve when I was 5 and saw my mom wrapping a present, then woke […]

As someone who loves a good countdown, I’ve always loved the idea of advent calendars. Although I never had one growing up, I decided long ago to make it a part of our family’s holiday traditions once a little one came around. With M turning 2 in January, this felt like the perfect year to […]

Growing up my parents had the tradition of making a nice family dinner on Sunday nights. Sunday afternoon we would go out and do something fun as a family, then on the way home we would stop at the local market, Harvest Ranch, and pick up groceries to make a delicious meal. We often picked […]

I recently read a fascinating article about rituals and how important they are to our day-to-day lives. I’ve always been a creature of habit and have naturally created rituals for myself throughout the years, but this article stuck with me and got me thinking about how I could create more rituals in my life, especially […]

When it comes to Christmas, I grew up with a very strict sense of what the holiday meant. Yes, as a Christian, it is a celebration of the birth of Christ, and that was always an important part of what we did. But in my household, while all of that was recognized, Christmas meant something […]

The Hindu festival of Diwali is coming up soon – on Oct 23! Diwali (or Deepavali, as our family and many others call it) is basically a celebration of the triumph of good over evil, and a time to be with family. As much as I would like to channel Kelly from The Office, I’ll attempt at giving a […]

I had planned on getting a post up today on holiday traditions, but time slipped away from me yesterday with all the Christmas preparations. I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas because my parents were immigrants and most of my friends were children of immigrants, and I honestly had no idea how big it was for […]