Our New Year’s Tradition
Last year, Dan and I started what we hope will be a life long tradition for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. We are always looking for more ways to be intentional and build traditions as a new family that will serve us, and in the future our children, well. So we wanted to find a way to be intentional with the start of a new year in a way that challenges us, encourages us, makes us slow down, and gives us a great opportunity to see the ways that God has provided. It’s simple, but was such a blessing starting it last year and it has been this year too as we were able to look back. I’ll outline it in a bit more detail below.
I’ve gone back and forth throughout my life between making new year resolutions and not, and between sticking to them and not. In general, I think it’s a bit romantic to make a resolution, which implies a firm decision or commitment, at the start of a new year. It seems like not many people stick to it, of course including myself, and it ends up being more of a flippant idea you share and act like you’re going to do without much real commitment or effort. So for a while now, I’ve hesitated a bit to make or at least publicly share resolutions.
Within the confines of my family however, I think it’s good to seriously talk about the things we hope for, the things we want to change, and the things we’d like to improve in. Knowing that, we came up with an outline of what we wanted to reflect on, talk about, journal about, etc. each year and how we wanted to record it so we could look back on it. The theme we came up with is “reflection & aspiration.” Each year we will both write down our own “reflections” on the past year and “aspirations” of the coming new year.
So around this time last year Dan and I went on a hunt for a journal. Of course, I was a bit particular about it and convinced Dan that if we were going to hold on to this journal for decades we wanted it to be nice. Don’t be as picky as me, though honestly I decided on a rather simple and affordable option from Walmart that I’m still very happy with. It even has an index that you can fill out which I love, so we label what page we begin the reflections section and what page we begin the aspiration section of each year. Unfortunately I can’t find the same one right now, but if I do I’ll link it. This is a similar notebook from Amazon – link (affiliate link).
Last year, we both took time to write a section at the beginning of the notebook of what we want this journal to be. This is a bit of a summary of what we each wrote:
“I hope to make this journal a place to both write down our thoughts about the year coming to a close and our hopes for the year just beginning. A place to put down our goals and dreams to help motivate us, generate conversation between us, and give us a place to see where God worked and provided.”
Emma
“I’d like to include personal reflections and goals, as well as goals for the two of us in our marriage.”
Emma
“In our reflections I would like to include the things that were hard and the things that we enjoyed the most. I’d like to include what we’re thankful for in the past year as well.”
Emma
“I would like this journal to be a time a time when we reflect on how we have stewarded our relationships: with God…with each other…with our church…with our family…with our community.”
Dan
Dan, of course, was very practical with his section and included three questions for each of those categories to ask ourselves in our reflections.
Last night we read through that first section and our other entries from last year to reminded ourselves of what to be thinking and praying about during this week.
- At some point this week, we’ll sit down together to write down our reflections looking back at 2022. Last year, we included important dates that we wanted to remember, and I imagine we’ll do that again this year. Like I said above, our reflections include the best and the worst.
- The next section that we’ll write (which we decided will fall into the reflections section) is a description of what we’re doing and how we’re celebrating New Year’s.
- Finally, we’ll write out our hopes, dreams, aspirations looking forward to 2022. I decided I like that word better than resolutions for this purpose. We want to include things that we aspire to do and also things that we resolve to do, but while making a clear delineation between the two. In reality we have far more aspirations, if we’re honest, than resolutions and I think that’s ok. It’s more realistic and true to letting our yes mean yes. Anyways, in this section, we first write out the hopes and resolutions we have together, and then individually.
And that’s it! It was so much fun to look back on what we wrote last year and we’re excited to do it again this year. I love how this little new year’s tradition offered us a chance to reflect and see the answered prayers, the challenges we overcame, and the blessings we were given.
what are your new year’s traditions?
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