Family Traditions Essay -- Personal Narrative Writing

It was going to be a bad Christmas. Nothing could be done to salvage it. The little tree (the only one we could afford) was bare, surrounded by its fallen needles. The Christmas presents were not much; Santa did not have the means to give the children what they had on their Christmas lists. It was going to be awful, the season of joy and giving was corrupted, nothing in the tiny apartment even resembled Christmas. The little, dead, bare Christmas tree was prophesying what the season would really bring that year to the family, almost nothing. How could they save the holiday? It seemed almost hopeless, but it turned into my family’s most loved and fun family ritual. To this day, I cannot remember a Christmas morning where Santa did not fill the entire living room floor with balloons. Every Christmas morning my family wakes up to a jungle of balloons; long skinny ones that look like baseball bats, the regular round ones, some that have a special design on the rubber, and others that are so tiny we do not notice them until we hear a big bang when we accidently step on them. This Christmas tradition is the one that saved Christmas back when I was really young. My parents, in an effort to save the holiday, had rushed to the local corner store and bought some balloons. The balloons were cheap, took a long time to blow up, and made that Christmas and every Christmas after that so much more exciting and fun than if my parents had been able to afford all the gifts we had on our list to Santa that year. I have always known that spending time with your family is important, but I never had a testimony of its importance in my life. When I read the words â€Å"wholesome family recreation† in the ... ...nce because when he was there we knew of our importance to him. Morning without prayer is not completely; those prayers helped me learn the gospel. There are so many benefits to wholesome family recreation that go unnoticed underneath all the fun. Before I started researching this topic, I did not think that having a testimony of recreation could be possible; testimonies were about tithing and the atonement. Now I realize that family traditions and rituals are an indispensable aspect of family life. I can say that I have a testimony in the importance of wholesome family recreation. When I start my own family, I want to continue and build new rituals so that we can build lasting and meaningful relationships. The Proclamation to the Family is incredibly insightful, who would have thought such a minor thing was really an ingredient to having a successful family.