Family Traditions and the Holiday Season

Holiday Traditions Make Amazing Photo Opportunities

Family traditions keep family members connected throughout the year. Many families have traditions, whether they occur during the holiday season, during birthdays, or even the weekly Sunday dinners many grew up experiencing.

Family traditions are a wonderful opportunity to get the family together and get those multi-generational photos many of us long to have. They bring with them extreme love, laughter, and fun. Furthermore, they help to create memories with those you love. Photos of family traditions show the true joy and love you shared without the need to stage an event or photo opportunity.

Celebrating Birthdays Then and Now

Family traditions vary from house to house and family to family. Some families get together to celebrate every birthday. They bring together parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brother, and sisters to enjoy another trip around the sun. Birthday celebrations can result in tons of laughter, stories, and love shared between both large and small families.

Remember when you were younger? In my family, mom would make a box cake (Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines). We would have a house full of family and friends laughing over cake and ice cream. Mom or Dad would bring out the old Kodak camera and capture pictures as we blew out the candles and laughed over stories of the past year.

In the year 2021, we order a birthday cake from the local bakery. While we still enjoy our birthdays with family and friends, the Kodak is no longer necessary. Instead, everyone brings out their cell phones and begin capturing photos. Then, they share their photos to their social media pages and keep them in their digital library.

Holiday Traditions in My Family and Others

Many families have certain holiday traditions. They may get together to exchange presents. Maybe they have a big event centered around trimming the Christmas tree or lighting the Hanukkah menorah.

I started a tradition in my family when my nieces and nephews were young. It started about 17 or 18 years ago. Each year, on December 23rd, we would get together and bake Christmas cookies. The 23rd was the last day of school for the kids before the holiday break began and it gave the parents some time to wrap gifts or just have dinner on their own. It also happened to be my grandmother’s birthday (she lived to be 101 years old, see the photo below!).  We would make some of our favorite cookies, many of which were my grandmother's and mother's recipes, and some were recipes the kids found online!  To this day, we still make my grandmother's sesame seed cookies...a big favorite!

Once we finished making a fun and laughter-filled mess in the kitchen, resulting in amazing cookies, we would celebrate the day with dinner and birthday cake. The memories we created will last us a lifetime. Although we no longer have my grandmother with us, we still get together every year to celebrate her and bake our Christmas cookies.

How a Photographer Can Help Capture These Memories for a Lifetime

Candid photo sessions are a great way to capture the true love and joy between your family. The holiday season and other special times throughout the year have a way of bringing everyone together, putting aside issues and concerns, to just enjoy each other and the memories you create.

Rather than trying to capture these memories on your own and leaving the photos in your phone to never see the light of day, you can invite a photographer into your lives to help you capture these memories and provide you with the prints to look back on for years to come. Seeing these moments in glossy prints can bring laughter and joy to your life once again, even when people and moments have faded away.

Do not let the holidays pass by without capturing the moments that make the holidays a time for love and giving. Contact Lisa Mongulla Photography at 856.297.0910 to help capture your family traditions.