Making a Family Tradition

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Did you ever wonder when and how many of your family traditions started or why they started?

Most American families have traditions passed down from their parents and grandparents. As the children marry and start their own families, they usually combined the traditions from each family for holidays and favorite foods and there starts another set of family traditions.

If you were raised in a different culture, such as Amish your traditions would be much different and run much deeper. They not only pass down their holiday traditions, every thing about the Amish Community is passed down.

Each Amish Community has a few traditions that are unique only to that community, such as the colors they are allowed to wear or the style of hats, but over all the Old Order Amish Communities are the same. Their homes, even though they may look different on the outside are all designed the same on the inside. The rooms all look the same, with the same furniture in the same places.

The English parents, as we are called by the Amish, strive to provide their children with a higher education, such as trade school or college; they want their children to be better educated than they were and to be able to make a better income for their own families when they marry and have children of their own.

The Amish children start at a very early age working with their parents on their farm, plowing, milking cows or goats, feeding livestock, learning to weave a rug with an antique rug loom, canning, or learning to weave wooden wicker baskets by hand.

By the young age of 4 or 5 years old the girls are already helping their mother in the kitchen, standing on stools washing dishes or helping with setting the table and with the clean up after the meals. They start picking vegetables, herbs and fruit from the family garden and learn to clean them as early as the age of 2 and 3. By the age of 10 or 11 almost all of the Amish young girls operate an antique wood cook stove, can cook a meal, bake bread, make pie crust, and roll out noodles. The young boys have learned to complete different styles of vintage wooden bird feeders and birdhouses. All the children can hitch up a team of horses and drive a buggy at this young age..

When they have completed the schooling at the end of the 8th grade, they will start full time working with their fathers and mothers at what ever their family does to make their living. The young men will work with their fathers, and the young girls will work with their mothers. Most of the men in the Old Order Amish Communities are farmers and wood craftsmen and have a business in their own workshop on their property. Although, they do construct buildings, homes, do remodeling of cabinets, and roofing with shingles and installing galvanized metal roofs The men make just about anything that can be produced from wood. While the mothers help with the family income by selling their baked goods, candy, quilts, and different sewing projects, such as alterations for the Englishers, rugs and wooden baskets.

Each Old Order Amish Family even has a tradition for caring for their parents when their age does not permit them to continuing with the heavy labor of their lifestyle.

The family, by that time, has already constructed a smaller home, which they call the dawdy house, it is attached to or a few yards away from the main home. The parents will move into the smaller home and one of the older children will take over the family business for the most part and move into the original home.

When the parents are ready to downsize their personal house wares, linens, and tools; they plan a family auction. Tables are set up allowing different members of the family to bid on just the tables that are designated for them. They usually start with the closest family member and work their down to the more distant family members until each table has been auctioned off.

To many of us this sound a bit odd, the English world would most likely just give their children or other family members the items that they no longer needed. The Amish, however, believe in not wasting anything, and that their children need to learn at an early age that nothing is gained or inspires them grow up with good work values if it comes without a cost.