Five Minute Favorite: Holiday True Stories

Are you ready to discover an untapped resource you carry as a parent?

Tell a true story.

Anytime, anywhere.

So long as you are conveying a tone of interest, intrigue, delight, curiosity - your child will come on board. Maybe not all of the time - but often enough to be developmentally and relationally significant.

Many of us wouldn’t self-identify as storytellers. We often tell stories as part of our work - constructing narratives is a part of so many professions. Yet we aren’t considering our capacity for storytelling with our children.

If you can develop this habit - a little vignette while on the bus or in a taxi, an anecdote while getting ready for bed - you will change your relationship with your child. They will know you better. They will feel a different sense of belonging with you and in your family framework. You also support the development of receptive and expressive language skills. You plant seeds that will lead to reading comprehension and creative writing.

In parenting, you’ve heard so much about the importance of reading to your child. Clearly, we have great belief in the power of meaningful books.

You have so much potential yet to be discovered in telling stories - and the holidays are an ideal time to start.

The winter holidays are fundamentally about storytelling, yet these stories are often told in ways that are too sweeping and too abstract for young children. You can offer more personal stories to your child. And in a time of material consumption, you want to offer a counterbalance of human connection.

The key is understanding this doesn’t need to be hard.

All you will have to do is share a simple memory that is appealing or intriguing in some way.

I had a few memories that I would recall in true stories with the children in my classroom community during the winter holidays. I was always surprised that these small moments, when conveyed with delight and with some sensory details, never failed to pique interest.

A few of my holiday true stories:

The largest dog I’ve ever seen - a magnificent wolfhound - wearing a giant red velvet bow walking around the streets of Georgetown one Christmas Eve.

The way I used to wake up before my family members as a child, make toast with jam, and sit in quiet beside the Christmas tree to appreciate the wonder and solitude each morning.

The Florentine cookies I started to make for my grandmother each December. The ingredients and textures, the process, the sharing.

These stories take just five minutes.

You’ll have to practice - but they don’t have to be perfect.

And you’ll want to repeat them to support retention.

Let your child know you.

Let your memories come to life in your family culture this holiday season.