Just think about your best and happiest selves as a family and the elements of celebration that make you feel most alive. These might include party music, treat foods, brightly colored decorations and fun activities. Combine them to create a themed holiday that allows you all to feel transported.
Wish you were on a beach right now? Turn up the heat for a few hours, dress in summer clothes, listen to sambas and old Beach Boy albums, serve lemonade with paper umbrellas and have an indoor cookout with burgers and hot dogs cooked on the stove.
Schedule an Indoor Family Olympics with silly sports you make up. Include eating contests, team t-shirts, and (cheap) trophies.
Have a “film festival” featuring all cartoons or all sci-fi. Make sure to eat buckets of popcorn. During intermissions, play toon charades or rate your favorite movies of all time. Present Oscars to family members for “Best Performance at the Dinner Table” or “Most Convincing Impersonation of a Teacher.” End by making an “experimental” short movie, with the kids taking turns as cameraman.
Whatever you do, be sure to include the kinds of “outburst” activities that help kids unwind, like popping those things that shoot confetti, blowing bubbles or dancing hard to loud music.
When my son was younger, our favorite way to inject some fun into the January blahs was to celebrate the January 18 birthday of author A.A. Milne by having a Pooh party in the family room. We would eat honey cookies and drink tea while sitting on a picnic blanket on the floor, surrounded by his Pooh-themed stuffed animals. And we would read Milne's Pooh stories and poems aloud.
Now Max has outgrown that holiday, but over the winter break, he started talking about how we really must invent something new for this hard season. He came up with Hobby Day, a weekend day on which we will each selfishly devote most of a day to our favorite hobbies, then meet for a feast at day's end and show what we've made. (We still have to find a hobby for my husband.)
If you're having trouble thinking of a new holiday right away, here's a newly invented one you can adopt: Belly Laugh Day. It's going to be celebrated for the first time this year, on January 24. The idea is to recall things that made you laugh in the past, and engage in activities like joke-telling and silly games to generate new belly laughs. Doesn't everybody have at least one specific memory of a situation where they laughed til they cried with friends?
Belly Laugh Day is the invention of Elaine Helle, a Portland-based woman who calls herself a “certified laughter leader” (it's not clear what authority issued the certificate). Elaine says it was only after she picked January 24 that she learned “that it's been declared the most depressing day of the year by a British researcher.” So there.
In any case, Elaine has put together a website that is an amazing resource, full of research and quotes about the value of laughter and its curative powers, as well as lists of fun ways to celebrate this new holiday. Go to belllylaughday.com . And to all you skeptics out there saying, “Who ever heard of one person launching a national holiday?” I have only one word to say: Kwanzaa.
Go forth and celebrate! Make up your own holiday, if you wish. Make it personal, make it fun, take pictures. And tell me all about it afterward, so I can share your idea in a future newsletter.
A former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, Meg Cox has spent the last decade researching and writing on contemporary family traditions. She has written two books and articles for such publications as Family Fun, Good Housekeeping, Working Mother and Parents. A mother and stepmother, Cox also lectures frequently and has worked as a traditions expert for such companies as Pillsbury, KFC Corp. and Hallmark. She publishes a free monthly email newsletter on rituals, and can be reached at FamilyRituals@aol.com.