I grew up in a happy home with a happy family. Now that I am a mom, I realize how amazing my parents were. They made things that are really quite hard (and require A TON of energy) look so easy… as if it were no work at all. As a mom, I can see how much work is required to incorporate the important things into life. As I am building my own family, I am looking at my childhood more closely to figure out how to build a successful home myself and I can see that what made life wonderful were our family rituals, or traditions.
Christmas was full of them. We had traditions leading up to Christmas, we had traditions that were a part of Christmas, and we had traditions after Christmas to cope with the fact that Christmas was over. These traditions built strong bonds within our family and taught us how to make life fun and centered on important things with the most important people in our lives.
So how does this apply to marriage? John Gottman says,
“Creating rituals in your marriage (and with your children) can be a powerful antidote to this tendency to disconnect. A ritual is a structured event or routine that you each enjoy and depend on and that both reflects and reinforces your sense of togetherness.”
The rituals we incorporate into our marriage (and family) can include anything that builds the bond between you. They become defining aspects of our lives and relationships. They strengthen the bonds we share and fortify our relationships from distraction, from distress, from disagreements, and from our very differences.
I have seen firsthand in my life the power of rituals.
I share the most important ritual in my life with my husband. It is faith in God and in His son, Jesus Christ. In his book Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, H. Wallace Goddard quoted President Ezra Taft Benson when he said,
“When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives. Our love of the Lord will govern the claims for our affection, the demands on our time, the interests we pursue, and the order of our priorities. We should put God ahead of everyone else in our lives.”
Putting God ahead of even each other, my husband and I can know that our priorities are in the proper order. It is the most comforting ritual we work on every single day. We are by no means perfect at it, but I know that as we continually work on it, or heads are on straight and the decisions big or small that we make are with the right purposes in mind. This tradition guides everything including what oppositions we allow in our lives and marriage and the answers of how best to deal with them.
There is nothing more important than the rituals in our home. Whether they define how we celebrate holidays, or how we talk to each other on a daily basis, the traditions and rituals that guide our home and family are everything. They are worth all the energy (and probably much more) that we can possibly put into them.
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