Of Rituals and Resolutions

The kids were asking us yesterday what some of our New Year's rituals are, knowing that our Chinese New Year's celebrations are highly ritualized. But we're pretty casual about the start of a new year--we didn't even stay up until midnight (though we taped the ball drop to watch later today)! Today we'll hang out, eat black-eyed peas and cornbread and greens (well, I will), and, perhaps most anticipated, watch The Clone Wars movie. And I'm adding a new thing: we'll make a dessert, this year a cherry pie (homemade crust, canned filling), a sweet to usher in a sweet new year. And Mama has a hankering for pie, especially since I've been reading Pascale le Draoulec's American Pie, about her pie odyssey across middle America (so far, I would more highly recommend Anne Dimock's Humble Pie, for a generational discussion of piemaking).

Anyway, we told the kids that many people make resolutions, or promises to try to achieve things in the new year. The kids have resolved to "make more books," one of their favorite activities being to draw sequential pictures in a narrative of their own making. They also said they wanted to learn to read this year (yes, yes, I prodded them on that one). And to "do kung fu" everyday. We also talked about living our values, something I'm going to keep in front of me this year, what they've been calling "faith in action" in church school. So we talked specifically about principles 1 and 7, i.e. the inherent worth and dignity of all people and the interconnected web of life on earth, which translates for the kids to respect people and reduce/reuse/recycle. A subset of that last one is a guideline I read about somewhere: when deciding on what to buy green, spend the most money on items closest to your body (i.e. food, fabrics, body products, cleaning products) and the least on those furthest (curtains, furniture, etc--though, does offgassing of those products count? Still working on this one). It was a fruitful conversation.

Mama and I have some other goals for 2011, think of it as ideas we want to foreground more than as "resolutions," specifically:

1. Live our values.

2. Be mindful.

3. Eschew judgement.

4. We will strive to do what we're thinking about, an inelegant way of saying that it's not good enough just to think about sending a card or calling or volunteering or donating, you have to do it. Sometimes we lack follow-through.

5. And one that has become more obvious to us recently: it's okay to run out or not have enough of something. Overabundance is not only not necessary, it's detrimental. This became obvious in planning food for Applepalooza, but also in how much I cook for dinner, what's stocked in the cabinets, number of Christmas presents, etc etc. Funny that this notion would be a surprise to us, but I guess we did come of age in the 1980s and 1990s, the complete opposite of the Great Depression.

Lastly, I'll be posting our semi-annual "Family Questionnaire" of likes and dislikes, which in a way record for me where we are and what's changed. And for the first time ever, the kiddos will get to participate.