Traaadittttion! Tradition!

Editor's note: I found this very old unpublished blog post written probably 5 years ago. I had forgotten that I tried to introduce "Chalica" as a tradition for our family.

The kids didn't care for it, as you'll read below, and as is the way with Unitarian Universalists, once it was recognized that, "... UUs began voicing discomfort that this created holiday—celebrated over the course of seven days—felt like a harmful appropriation of holidays like Kwanzaa and Hanukkah."

So, Chalica was never really a thing for us, and now it's not a thing for any UUs.

Here's the original post:

Fiddler On The Roof, you know.

We did a de-brief after Christmas to hear what traditions people like and believe we should keep, and which traditions aren’t high on our list.

I’ll sum up.

Chalica is out.

Chalica is a lovely idea, created to help Unitarian Universalist folks live the 7 principles. If we’d been doing it since the children were small, as Monkey pointed out, it would now be part of our expectation and plan for the season.

We haven’t, so it isn’t, and trying to add another new tradition this year didn’t resonate with us.

The one activity we did, on the first night, was attempting to create individual chalices out of candy, that I somehow envisioned we’d light and use all seven nights of Chalica.

You’d think I don’t even know us.

So, as lovely a vision as it is, Chalica is out.

The new tradition that stays with unanimous approval: Reverse Advent.

We had two parts to this:

1) A new person each night choose a question to ask. May or may not be Christmas related. Examples from this year included, “What’s your favorite Christmas movie?” “What’s your favorite present you’ve ever gotten?”

2) After you answer your question, you choose a food item to go into the boxes that will be donated to the food pantry. It got to be a joke that Buster would always choose a box of pasta.

He loves pasta, and wants the whole world to share that love.