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UU Faith Works Summer/Fall 2003 Administration
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Our Family Book of Days; A Record Through the Years
by Kathleen Finley
Denver, CO: Morehouse Group, 1997Review by Pat Hoertdoerfer
Children, Family, and Intergenerational Programs Director, UUA
Boston, MA
October 17
Isabella's birthday
Survived hurricane Hugo
Black Poetry Day
LaLeche League formed
International Fair
Hindu festival of
Navaratra DasharaHow do you record important family events? How do you remember your family's special heritage? How do you celebrate family birthdays? Unitarian Universalist holidays? National holidays? World community events? Famous people? How do you recognize family memories and milestones, such as moving day or first tooth cut or graduation day or wedding anniversary or vacation trip or welcoming a foreign houseguest?
This book is designed as a tool to help your family remember and celebrate more easily your family's heritage and traditions. Our Family Book of Days offers a guide for becoming aware of all the lives that touch your own, while remembering and celebrating your family's own unique ceremonies and sacred moments. The structure for the book is one that every family reads—the calendar.
Each month in this calendar book begins with an introduction filled with suggestions for family rituals to celebrate important days of the month, moveable religious feasts, and nature's seasons. Every day of the month lists birthdays, religious festivals, national holidays, and important events connecting a family to the greater religious and political world. Birthdays of famous people (authors, political leaders, musicians, sports figures) offer an invitation to explore their work and contributions to our culture. Religious feasts suggest celebrating our own traditions or learning more about the heritage of others in our multicultural world.
No family will want to celebrate all the events or ideas in this book, but the multiplicity of suggestions invites every family to find the ideas it needs to create the rituals and traditions that become a part of their lives. Let this book become part of your lives as a way to deepen your awareness of the days and months of your family heritage. As Unitarian Universalists, we are rediscovering a deep hunger in all of us for tradition and roots in our family, in our UU congregations, in the world community, and on our planet Earth.
Holy events are happening every day in our families. We may be too busy with the constant buzz of family life to recognize the sacred in the ordinary days of our lives, but take out the family album, the box of snapshots, the slide projector or video and look back. Remember and recall together the events and people in your pictures. Name the values and glimpses of the holy that marked your lives and the celebrations that identified what your family stands for and your people stood for. Give this book to every child leaving home or every new family beginning a new life together or every new family celebrating membership in your congregation.
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