More than being rest days, holidays are time for family. Annual holidays like Christmas and New Year bring parents and children together at home or someplace else to rest, bond together, and catch up.
Annual holidays that are not supposedly for merriment, such as All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, are nevertheless opportunities for children, parents, and other family members to bond together.
In today’s very busy society, however, not all children, parents, and other family members regard All Saints’ Day the way it was seen before – a day of remembering the dead with the whole family, sometimes spending the November 1 and 2 holidays at cemeteries.
Parents who wait for loved ones to come from the big city and into the province to commemorate this day may be disappointed to find out that they prefer to spend the two-day holiday elsewhere – at an out-of-town resort, or just at home. People have either grown tired of tradition, or discovered new ways by which to spend holidays.
At this point, parents must realize that All Saints’ Day has gone into the homogeneous mix of other holidays that are seen for their leisurely perks rather than what each day means.
Children, parents, and relatives who nurture this mindset among themselves will find less and less reason and opportunity to gather every year for nothing more than family bonding. The stress brought by everyone’s respective year-round obligations has a lot to do with the new comfort-seeking convenience of staying put inside the house in special days such as this.
Parents who do not wish this to happen must be able to persuade family members to go the extra mile, quite literally. Children, parents, and relatives must be reminded of the good times of the past, and similar opportunities of rekindling relationships that good-old family bonding brings.
For parents to succeed, activities that will pique everyone’s interests may be considered. Holding a Halloween Party for the children, for instance, is a nice idea. Parents must also be open to others’ suggestions on what to do and where to go during All Saints’ Day. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to take a picnic at the beach to further interest your family members, but emphasize that traditions like visiting the dead will have to be done first before anything else.
Parents must remember the advantage that being a family member brings: you only need the power of persuasion to support your cause. Children, parents, and relatives must help one another in making holidays such as this not just any other rest day, but one to remember each other with throughout the year, until the next one comes.
