3 posts tagged “family traditions”

For months leading up, the Beloved would ask me, “What are your family traditions for being at the beach?”  And I would tell her that we had zero experience with spending a week together at the beach as a family (PLENTY of experience with day-trips) but very little in extended stays.  In some ways, we were going to have to establish our own.

We got to the East Coast with very little problem in which we stocked up for supplies and had a birthday dinner for me at my favorite cheesesteak place in NJ and took a leisurely drive on Saturday to Sea Isle City, where we convened with my brother, his family and my sister to begin Down The Shore—2009.

I hadn’t been to Sea Isle probably since I was 17 and I thought it looked great.  Our  house was a stone’s throw from the beach and really comfortable – and it’s clock set the correct tone for the vacation.

We had great weather --- warm with a calm warm ocean early in the week, turning cooler and rougher as Hurricane Bill passed by out in the Atlantic.

Our days were pretty easy… we’d all trundle out of bed for a slow wake-up with coffee, cereal and the paper.   By 10 or so, the first wave of folks would head down to the beach.  I would tend to stay back on the deck under the umbrella, choosing not to expose my pale, SPF70 slathered skin to the sun and surf until after 2 pm.  We’d hang on the beach, watch the waves, seagulls and people, go for a swim and head back for happy hour and dinner.  (As you might have guessed, I was in charge of happy hour… ).  It was all very civilized.  We ate out a couple of nights, walked the promendade, played games.  It was great.

One day, the fam went up to Atlantic City to see an airshow – and while I love my family dearly, standing out in the sun for 5+ hours was not a choice I was willing to make.  As an alternative, the Beloved and I took a tour of the other southern shore towns – Avalon, Stone Harbor, Wildwood and Cape May.  It was a great trip and highlighted how different each of the towns were.

One of the reasons for the trip was so that the Beloved could see Wildwood – probably the last remnant of “tacky boardwalk” left in The Garden State.  I’d last been there after graduating high school – some friends and I rented a house for a week.  There were still lots of crappy t-shirt shops and amusement piers and tram cars.

We stopped and got pizza and drank it all in.  We finished up by driving over to The Villas, the town on the Delaware Bay side where my grandmother had a house for so long.  Not nearly as upscale as the seaside towns, the Villas was a great place to end the trip – really bringing the week full circle.

At last, the week was at an end (how quickly it goes by) and we all bought souvenir shirts and gathered on the slightly-Bill-touched beach to say our farewells.

We all thought we would do it again – perhaps a new tradition in the making!

There’s been a lot of discussion this past week about what peoples’ favorite dish is for Holiday meals.

And yesterday as we were going about our tasks of feastly preparations, I realized that there was another aspect to a favorite “dish” that I hadn’t thought about.  Here are my favorite dishes.  They are Buffalo Pottery and depict exotic “asian” vignettes.  Full of birds, stylized trees and pagodas, I’m sure they were meant to bring a little of those then-practically unknown foreign lands to American tables.

I inherited these two serving dishes from my mom when she passed away a few years ago.   On the back of each piece is the Buffalo Pottery emblem and date of manufacture.  The platter was made in 1909 and the serving dish is a little blurred, but I think it’s 1910.

They were the “special” service that came out only on really important family meals – Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Easter.  They were her mother’s before her and her mother’s before her.  That’s nearly a century of tables and family get-togethers that tie a turn-of-the-century farm in lower Delaware to a turn-of-a-different-century home in southern California.

That’s pretty cool.

When I was growing up, we had a summer family tradition – no tradition isn’t quite the right word – "ritual" seems more correct.  Every (and I mean damn near every) Sunday during the summer, we would pack up the family and head “down the shore”. 

Specifically, we would drive down and visit my grandmother at her summer house and then head over to Cape May for several hours of beach time.  We’d then head back, get cleaned up, all go out to dinner (to the same restaurant) and then head home – often arriving back to the Ancestral Betz Home after 10 pm.  Did I mention that my father worked six days a week and that Sunday was his only “day off”?  Wow.

Now Dad liked to drive and since we were going to take all of Sunday, he liked to take the back roads down to The Villas. (The Villas -- where my grandmother's house was -- is a small town on the bay-side, just a few miles from Cape May, which is on the ocean side…).  We would stop at road-side produce stands (New Jersey is afterall the Garden State, you know) and pick up tomatoes and peaches for Nan and ourselves.  When I was about 12, Nan sold the Villas house, my brother married, my sis moved out of the house, and the ritual stopped.

So, while we were home and visiting my brother and his family, we decided to re-visit the family tradition.  So that Sunday morning, we packed up the family and headed down the shore – I even convinced my brother to attempt to find the backroads that Dad had so consistently kept to.

It was great fun.  We only got turned around the wrong way once (ok, maybe twice…) and we made it to the Villas in what we thought was surprisingly good time.  We went to see where Nan’s house had been (sadly re-sided in icky blue vinyl and the lot where I remember playing sub-divided), and went the few blocks down to the bay – an area that had seen better days.

After that, we were off to the beach (with me covered by both sunscreen and umbrella).  The lifeguards weren’t very busy as the water temp was abnormally cold, but we hung out for a while enjoying the sights and salt air, and the Beloved and I took a walk, watching kids play in the sand (just like when I was a kid…) and even New Jersey surfers (never there when I was a kid…), until a late thunderstorm sent everyone scurrying for their cars.

We had a great seafood dinner (sadly the family ritual restaurant was no more), and got ice cream, and headed back.  It was a really great day full of old and new memories.

I think Dad would have approved.