Monday, August 22, 2016

Challenge Myself: Day #65 Family Treasures

Today is Day #65 of our Nar Anon Group Just For Today Challenge. I am also integrating the Live Happy into my Challenge. The Live Happy Challenge for today is about making time for family and about gathering family treasures.

The book says,

Strengthen your family connection by reaching out to relatives wherever they may be. One way to forge a stronger family identity is to host a picnic, reunion, and invite all of your relatives.

Make a special dish from a recipe handed down from previous generations. Before the day is over, make certain that each family member gets a copy of that treasured recipe.

Encourage them to pass it along to their children and grandchildren.

Your effort creates a tangible link to the past, encourages celebration of your shared identity., calls up memories of past eras and perhaps historical events, and strengthens family bonds.

Those beloved relatives who made that dish perhaps even centuries before you have long since passed on, but you can remember them whenever you make it.

We have a family reunion each year bringing both sides of my mom and dads family together on the same day. (My sisters idea). Over the past two years it seems that only my dads family now attend. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it is the other side of the family feels uncomfortable? I don't know.

This year we tried handing out recipe cards so that the older generations could write down the treasured recipes in the hopes of putting together a cook book. That is a bust because no one turned in any recipe cards.

Most of my cooking skills were taught to me by my mother in law. She was one of ten children in her family and grew up during the depression years. She taught me to make many dishes from that era in time. Her cooking style taught some lessons on being frugal and saved some money on groceries.

Over the past few years I have also learned the art of canning my own foods that I grow or sometimes buy from the farmers market. One staple I make is sauerkraut, pickles and jellies and jams.

I love shopping at God's Grocery Store (my word for foraging) for wild food. For instance mustard greens in the spring time. Mustard greens grow everywhere in the springtime. We also pick raspberries in the early summer.

Just For Today: Making time for family time.

From the book: Live Happy



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