How to Start a Charming Family Tradition: 3 Easy Steps
Sunday, September 6th, 2009A sense of family history is important. Some families have a great-grandmother’s engagement ring, a silver tea set a grandad’s brother found at an estate auction or a plastic chip and dip set in the shape of platypus your mother received as a wedding gift. You don’t have to dig an old broken vase out of your father’s attic to kick-start an heirloom tradition. Rather, initiate your own family tradition today by collecting Italian Charms for your children.
Italian Charms bracelets are the perfect family tradition and treasure: they are not as fragile as that old vase, not so valuable that they can’t be worn on a day to day basis, and not so old that they fall out of style. Rather, the great thing about Italian Charms is that they create a dynamic tradition: each generation can add new links to the charm bracelet to reflect their own life and interests, which keeps the tradition significant, meaningful, and alive.
Discover the three easy steps to begin the process of inventing an heirloom:
1) Begin by purchasing a starter bracelet.
Starter bracelets are an affordable way to get a charm bracelet started. These become the foundation of the bracelets. They are made up of individual plain links that can be connected or separated at will. Since the starter bracelets are made of a series of plain, individual charms, each carefully selected charm that you add will become a point of contrast and interest in the changing, overall design. This is a valuable way of going about creating an Italian Charm collection because you want to be patient and collect your charms over many years, not all at once.
2) Buy charms over time that reflect meaningful events or stages in the lives of each family member.
On the occasion of your children’s births, purchase charms with their birthstones, their names, or the year or place of their birth. From that day forward, pay attention: what do your children enjoy? What are their hobbies and pastimes? What subjects interest them in school? To which activities do they dedicate their free time outside of school? Choose an Italian charm that represents each of those interests, accomplishments and milestones.
3) Give the bracelets to your children or other family members.
The giving step might be a little difficult for you. It may feel as if you’re giving away part of yourself as you have taken such care over so many years to collect the pieces of memories. Choose the occasion of your daughter’s sweet sixteen, or your son’s 18th birthday, or select your children’s high school or college graduations—or even their marriages—to bestow upon them their beautiful charm bracelets. Explain to them the significance of each of the charms, and how and why you selected them as you did. Demonstrate how and where they might add on to their charm bracelets to keep the tradition alive, and how, one day, you hope that they will pass their charm bracelets on to their children (after having added charms that reflect the important events in their own children’s lives, of course).
Leave that old vase in your father’s attic. Start a dynamic new tradition for your children today. Follow these simple steps to get started; you will find that the tradition takes on a life of its own after several years. Perhaps you might even involve your children in the selection of new charms each year! Just think, one day someone will add a charm that says: “I Love My Grandparents.”
