Celebrate the Spring Festivals With Family Traditions

God gives us special days to celebrate and learn from each year. Our own family traditions can enhance those celebrations and deepen the lessons.

Each year as we celebrate the spring festival season, we’re reminded about God’s plan for us. As we look back and remember how God delivered His people Israel from slavery and brought them to freedom, we also look forward to the time when we’ll be completely free from the slavery of this world.

As we put leavening out of our homes for seven days, representing putting sin out of our lives, we look forward to the time when we’ll be sin-free as children of God in the Kingdom of God.

This is a wonderful time, and our children should be included in this celebration.

Family traditions

A good way to help our children become familiar with and look forward to this season is to establish traditions that the family can share together and look forward to each year.

You may already have traditions that your family shares together. Following are some additional ideas that you may want to try:

• Allow your children to take part in preparing your home for the spring festivals. Even the youngest child can help hunt for those cookie crumbs under the cushions.
• A week or more before the festivals, help the children make cards appropriate for the season and send them out to someone special. Older children may want to use the computer to come up with just the right card.
• Take your children on a shopping trip and encourage them to learn to read labels and look for leavening in food products.
• Set aside a special day or night and have the whole family get involved in making unleavened cookies, cakes and breads, etc.
• Sometime during this season read the story of the Passover in Exodus 12. Everyone in the family can take part in reading verses, or you can select one person to read one year and then another one to read the story the next year.
• You can also let the children perform a play and dress for the parts. Use your imagination to come up with interesting props, such as Ping-Pong balls for hail, plastic insects and frogs, white round stickers for boils and red markers for cardboard doorways.
• Play the game of “Four Questions.” The Jewish people do this at their seder meal. (The seder is based upon Jewish tradition. Not all of its customs are part of Scripture, but these questions are thought-provoking and can be a useful tool for parents.) Choose an adult or child to ask questions, such as:

1.       Why is this night different from other nights?
2.       What does it mean to be free?
3.       Who in the family is a firstborn?
4.       What animal was killed on the Passover?

You may want to choose other questions or use more than four. Be sure that the questions are answered in a way that the children understand.

Creating traditions

One definition of tradition is: “The handing down of information, beliefs and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another.”

As you continue to repeat an activity at a particular time on a regular basis, it becomes a tradition. Once a tradition is established, everyone begins to look forward to keeping it going; and when it is shared within a family or with friends, it becomes something they all look forward to and enjoy together each year.

If you haven’t already established spring festival traditions, this may be the year to start. Here’s to good, meaningful and fun traditions!

See the previous posts in this series at “Make the Spring Festivals a Family Affair” and “Preparing for God's Holy Days With a Joyful Heart.”

Shelby Faith is a mother and grandmother and attends the St. Louis, Missouri, congregation of the Church of God, a Worldwide Association.