Apple Day and the Rhythm of Seasons

He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy. Acts 14:17

I've been pondering lately how the seasons provide so many opportunities for families to grow and create shared memories together. I have joyful recollections from my own childhood, all centered around the seasons. Every year my parents took our family apple picking, and we spent the day at the orchard and afterward making apple pies and pots of applesauce for canning. The tradition started many years before with my grandparents, and two generations later, we'll never let a year go by without taking our daughter on an apple adventure of her own. I have countless memories from these family times together. I remember the time we saw cider being made and we all ate so many apples that we got "apple sick" as coined by my younger brother (the golden delicious did us all in!).

We have had many different guests accompany us on our family apple excursions over the years, ranging from neighbors and school friends to foreign exchange students and a punk rock band! Everyone lent a hand peeling apples for the big pot of sauce, and in turn went home with a jar or a yummy slice of pie. There was the time the boys tried to see who could throw apples the furthest, and the time my mom had a prize for the one who picked the "biggest apple." There are the times it was sunny and beautiful and the times it was rainy and cold, all fun in their own ways. When we lived far from home, we many times travelled back for Apple Day, as us kids grew to call it. Apple Day became our very own little family holiday, nothing else to really celebrate except each other.

Then there is the german potato salad that my grandmother made every year for Christmas dinner (and that day only), connecting us in a small way to our family heritage. On the other side of my family, my grandmother almost always brought paczki on Fat Tuesday, and I often got stories from my mom of her Busia making traditional prune-filled paczki and how she loved to smell them cooking as a child. There are the more subtle things too, like husking corn on the deck into brown paper bags, and chomping into them later... and picking out just the right sized cucumbers for my grandma's bread and butter pickles.

Now with my own family, I am convinced how much families and children especially thrive on this kind of family rhythm, and how much the seasonal activities can teach our families and grow them together. Kids love to help and be a part of a family project, even more knowing it is purposeful (and delicious). These things are a great leveler between parents and children and siblings of various ages. It gives our family a stability and a rhythm of the year, and gives us a common anticipation for each coming season.

Our family has been intentional this year about cooking through the seasons, and as we do, I can see how we are forming these traditional family meals - the kind we only eat one time of year and look forward to them coming again. As I labor over these meals I can imagine it, anticipating next spring when we can again make a simple mixed green salad with strawberries, quinoa stir fry with fresh peas from the pod... and in the summer a fresh pesto pizza with homegrown tomatoes, and pasta with pesto and zuchinni, all from our own garden or farmer's market. This week has been a week of corn on the cob in our home, and cooking dinner has become a family affair, with daddy and our todder learning to husk corn on the deck (into a paper bag, of course), and enjoying the sweet look on our daughter's face as she eats up an entire ear of corn... when normally she rarely eats corn by itself at all.

Scripture talks about the seasons often, and we are foolish to think that we have somehow as a society "progressed" beyond them. We need these seasons, even if only metaphorically as we create a rhythm to our own lives that is filled with purpose and always seeking after God, allowing him to feed us spirtually in our need. After a long cold winter, we need a reminder of a resurrected Jesus, along with a coming up of the first greens. We need the refreshment of the summer, vacation, and the nutrition of fresh vegetables and sunshine. We need the rewarding work of storing and preparing for the winter, and we need that reward in the cold months of a warm hearty soup, the foodstores of the harvest season, and the hope of a Christ child. I am feeling incredibly grateful today for these yearly rhythms in my life, especially the kind that have served me as memory markers, allowing me to catalog and cherish the many moments of gratefulness I have had in my life. God himself has provided me with plenty of food and filled my heart with joy.

What seasonal memories do you cherish from your childhood or family?