Family Traditions Make the Holidays For a Widow – The Sisterhood of Widows Blog Archive

Gentle guidance: Family Traditions Make the Holidays For a Widow

This post is part of Mary’s archived writings from 2010–2025. Some older posts may mention products, courses or shop items that are no longer available. Mary’s book is still available on Amazon , and she now offers her active support inside her private Facebook group for widows .

Family Traditions Make the Holidays For a Widow

By Mary Francis · Originally published: December 4, 2018

Archive notice: This is a historical post from Mary’s years of blogging. Some older posts may mention products, courses or shop items that are no longer available, as Mary now focuses her time and energy on supporting widows inside her private Facebook community. The guidance and stories remain here as a free resource for widows.

For current ways to connect with Mary’s work, you can:

Read her book on Amazon .
Request to join her private Facebook group for widows .

Traditions are more important than ever, as they provide opportunities for widows to think about their family member and renew the love they have for each other. Holidays symbolize our beliefs and they serve a useful purpose. It pushes us to focus on others and it gives us an opportunity for reminiscing about all the things our family did to make past holidays special. Those memories still shine in the eyes of our children, who are now passing on our traditions to their own children. Donnie and I had the tradition of letting our children open one of their gifts (non-Santa) on Christmas Eve after supper. They would shake and look over their presents for days, so they could pick that one special gift for Christmas Eve. Now my son has passed that tradition on to my two grandchildren. I love watching them pick out that one special Christmas Eve gift. It brings me peace to know that Donnie and I will be part of their Christmas traditions long after we are both gone. Another traditions was watching Christmas movies and I’m listing a few of my special ones: • Miracle on 34th Street • A Christmas Story • A Charlie Brown Christmas • It’s a Wonderful Life • Elf • How the Grinch Stole Christmas What Christmas traditions have you passed on to your children? Do you have a special Christmas movie to add to this list?