Global Family Day

Each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, I revise my holiday card list. This year, my family changed – two relatives died in October and I sponsored several new children. Early in December, I sent greetings to family and friends in Ethiopia, Guinea, Ireland, Israel, Mozambique, Palestine, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the US. About one in five envelopes carried international postage.

How is your family different now from the one of your youth? Have your traditions changed over the years, or do they closely resemble your childhood memories?

When I was young, my favorite aunt and uncle arrived from out of town on New Year’s Eve. My cousins joined us in an extended slumber party. We camped out indoors while snow piled up outside. To celebrate, we popped corn and stirred spice into mugs of apple cider. After midnight, while everyone else slept, my brother and I took our toboggan into the woods and raced down icy hills in the dark. We never got hurt; we never got caught. My childhood memories contain elements of danger, but resolve into peace.

On January 1, 2000, the United Nations initiated the International Decade for the Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World with a millennial celebration called One Day In Peace. Since then, the US observes Global Family Day on January 1st. Along with New Year’s resolutions, brunches, parades and football games, we begin each year honoring family and peace, for the sake of the world’s children.

Peace seems elusive, but there’s cause for hope. During university, I studied in Ireland and England, two sides of a guerilla war spanning most of the 20th century. Today it’s history. Later, I lived in Palestine, where parents with means sent their children abroad in pursuit of peace. And I traveled in Cambodia. During the 1970s its civil war and genocide destroyed millions of families.

Not far from the thousand temples of Angkor, the capital city of the ancient Khmer Empire, a Buddhist monastery commemorates the Khmer Rouge genocide. The skulls of unidentified infants and children fill its glass stupa – a reliquary where monks and visitors meditate. Today in Siem Reap Province, genocide survivors eke out a living on the water, fishing a lake fed by the Mekong River. Men and women build homes on stilts in Tonlé Sap (freshwater lake), docking their boats in the doorways. Even pre-school children steer tiny tin coracles around the lake, scooping up fish.

Peace is always possible. Imagine it today

#family #childhood #culture #traditions #peace #cambodia