Drumroll please! It’s time to announce the 2025 Family Favorites!
The results of these contests are always fun and interesting to read, and especially when I compare the winners to my grandchildren’s personal preferences.
Things have changed a lot just from one generation to the next.
Back in the olden days when my kids were young, our household operated as a benevolent dictatorship – which is to say, I made nearly all of the decisions. It just didn’t occur to me to poll my kids to see what they wanted to do or where they wanted to eat.
At the same time, however, I did take their likes and dislikes into consideration. It was incredibly rare that we ever ate out, unless the kids had accumulated a handful of free personal-size pizza coupons with their Accelerated Reader points.
It simply wouldn’t have made sense to go out to eat as a family at a place where the kids would have just picked at the food I paid good money for.
The fact is, there were far fewer options back then than there are now. On those rare occasions when we did go out to eat, the choices were basically a toss-up between burgers and pizza.
With four kids, there was too great a risk of a 2-2 tie for most votes, so our family came up with a creative way to eliminate that problem.
Fortunately for me, my kids’ birthdays fell into a neat pattern: July, August, September and October. So automatically, each kid “owned” his or her birthday month, along with every fourth month thereafter. The July kid also got November and March. The August kid got December and April. And so on.
When it was your month, you got to ride up front in the van – in the shotgun seat.
You got the extra M&M after a bag had been divided.
You got to pick out the video on Family Movie Night and the board game on Family Game Night.
You got “the good blanket” to snuggle up in on the couch.
You got to decide what we would do for fun after Saturday chores were completed.
But you also were assigned the dreaded drudgery of sorting and matching the enormous pile of socks on laundry day.
You had to wash the supper dishes and sweep and mop the kitchen floor.
“It’s my month” was a mantra repeated often (and loudly) through those years, regarding the “good” choices.
Likewise, “It’s your month” was trumpeted equally often, and even more loudly, regarding the “bad” choices.
It was a system that worked for us.
And even now, looking back after all these years, I have to admit that the practice of assigning months really was a Family Favorite.
