Celebrate Today- ceremonies and celebrations to make your days count

We write letters of what we are thankful for each year and keep them in a notebook. Having started this in 1995, it's such a treat to have these little time capsules from each year.  When we have celebrated Thanksgiving at other family's houses,  we would not ask everyone to participate, and just the four of us in our immediate family would write letters and read them together later over the holiday weekend.  Over the last few years when we have hosted Thanksgiving at our house, we have invited those gathered with us to write a letter if they wanted to (making sure they understood that there was no pressure) to read around our table after our Thanksgiving feast.   The best thing was that this year, we had Marcet Crockett with us who is a sophomore at SPU and we invited her to write a letter. I pulled out our notebook of Thanksgiving letters and was able to show her three letters from 1998 when we spent Thanksg...

      When Anna was about 18 months old, I was invited to a service called “The Crossing” that a family from our church put together for their 13 year old son. As Christians do not have a particular rite of passage like in the Jewish tradition of having a Bar Mitzvah, they wanted to mark this time in his life of turning 13 and entering adolescence with a significant ceremony.  The year leading up to this event was one that involved a year-long service project, a retreat with some significant people in his life, a father/son trip, and a service at our church.   They also gathered a group of people when their son turned 12 and asked them to commit to praying for their son through the year up until his 13th birthday, and then these people gathered around his 13th birthday to speak words of blessing to him.   Since they took the whole year to do all these things, it was not overwhelming, and their intentionality helped to make this a ve...

One family we knew in Nashville had a Wheel of Candy in their frontyard (like a wheel of fortune that you could spin.) Trick-or-treaters could get in line to spin the wheel. They might land on the words that said that they won one, two or three pieces of candy. They might land on the words that said that they would lose one, two or three pieces of candy.    Or, the other option was that they might win a vegetable.   Back in 2004, Anna spun the wheel and won a piece of celery when she was two, and it was the prize of the evening. She carried it around like a trophy all night.        We took this tradition with us to Seattle when we moved out west and created our own Wheel of Candy. We've enjoyed it for the last few years as one of the ways we welcome people to our house on Halloween.      2012 2013 2014 2015 Because our kids brought home WAY too much cand...