Family traditions.

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My husband went on a business trip to WY for a couple of days. When he came home, he brought me this:

It's a delicious loaf of multi-grain bread baked completely from scratch. It's also a family tradition...

My Dad started this tradition many moons ago, when I was still modeling my very first pair of underwear, the most fashionable in the area (after all, my Dad did work for a textile factory back then). He was also going to school. But in order to support his pretty broke family, he had to work two jobs. So he decided to be an off-campus student getting correspondence assignments from a University in a different city. He was studying to be a lawyer.

Even though he would get most of his assignments by mail, twice a year he had to go to school and spend a month there trying to pass a bazillion tests. That city was about 8 hours by train from where we lived but it had one of the best correspondence programs in the country (he did become a very decent lawyer...in all the meanings of the word). But that meant travel, rent and other expenses you face when you stay somewhere for a whole month. My parents were poor. They were broke.

It was before we even had a home phone, so the only connection that my parents had were handwritten letters and rare phone calls to the neighbors. It was a long seven years (that's how long it took my Dad to finally finish college), especially for my Mom.

That's why my Dad always wanted to bring her something special as a token of his love. But because they had very little money, all he could come up with was a loaf of bread... Every six month he would scavenger the bakeries in that other city to find a new kind of bread we hadn't tried before.

Soon we were looking forward to this special treat. And that's how the tradition was born. Even now, many years later, when we can easily afford other small tokens and souvenirs, the "loaf of bread" is still always there.

And now we're sharing this tradition with our kids... And they surely enjoy it :)

Do you have any traditions that are very dear to your family? Even if it might seem like nothing worth mentioning to others?

Please, do share :) I love to learn about other families' traditions!