What family traditions did you start?

Why this question works

Traditions are how a family recognizes itself, yet the people who keep them rarely know where they began. Asking your grandpa which ones he started shows you the origins: what he brought from his own childhood, what he invented on a whim and what began as an accident that everyone insisted on repeating.

It is a quietly meaningful question for him. A tradition is something a person builds for the people they love, usually without announcing it. When you ask about it, you are telling him that it worked: you noticed, and it matters to you. The answer also helps the family keep those traditions going with the details right. You find out why the pancakes have to be shaped like initials, or why the first slice always goes to the youngest. Knowing the reason makes a custom much easier to carry on.

How to ask it

Ask in the middle of a tradition if you can. Holidays, birthdays and family vacations are when these habits are on display, so the question fits right in. "Grandpa, who started this?" is all it takes.

Be appreciative and specific. Name a tradition you love and ask how it began. If he says he did not start anything, that it was all Grandma, ask what the two of them did in the early years that was different from how he grew up. Often he will then realize that he started more than he thought. Ask too which traditions he hopes you will keep.

Other ways to word it

• Which of our family traditions began with you?
• What did you do with your children every year without fail?
• What traditions did you bring from your own childhood?
• How did our holiday routine get started?

Follow-up ideas

• How did that tradition begin? Was it planned?
• What traditions did your own parents have?
• Was there one you tried that never caught on?
• Which tradition do the children love most?
• Is there a recipe, a song or a saying that goes with it?
• Has it changed over the years?
• Which tradition would you most like us to keep going?

An example answer

This is an invented example, written to show the kind of detail to listen for. Your grandpa’s answer will be his own.

"The birthday breakfast was mine. When your mother turned five, I had to leave for work before she woke up, and I felt bad about it. So I got up at four and made her pancakes with a candle in the stack, and woke her up to eat them in the dark at the kitchen table, just the two of us. She thought it was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened."

"The next year her brother demanded the same, and after that there was no getting out of it. I made birthday pancakes before dawn for thirty years, and then for the grandchildren when they slept over. I never planned to start a tradition. I was just a tired man trying not to miss a birthday. But I notice your mother does it for you now, and I will admit that when I heard that, I had to step outside for a minute."

What to write down

For each tradition, write down what is done, when and by whom, and how it began. Record the details that have to be right: the recipe, the song, the order of events, the saying that goes with it. Note which customs came from Grandpa's own childhood and which were his invention. Ask which ones he most hopes will continue, and put a star beside them.

A question like this one has a page of its own in the family chapter of the Tell Me Your Story, Grandpa journal. Written down with the how and the why, a tradition becomes something the next generation can keep exactly as he meant it.

See the Tell Me Your Story, Grandpa journal. For more ideas, read questions to ask your grandparents or browse family and parenting questions.