Are you a book lover? Here are some great book-related traditions to bring your love of reading into your everyday life.
1. Read with your children at night before going to bed.
Reading together strengthens relationships and is also great for your child’s intellectual and emotional development.
2. Go on monthly library or bookstore trips with your family or friends.
This is a great tradition that will not only help you find more books you’ll love, but also allow you to share your love of books with others.
3. Play book charades.
Put book charades into your family’s rotation of fun games. To play, break up into teams, and each team makes book-related clues for the other team to act out and guess. You can pull ideas from several books, or from a certain genre of books, or from a specific book.
4. When you travel, find a book about the area you are traveling in and take it home as a souvenir.
You can even include a few notes on the first blank page of the book with highlights about your trip.
5. Celebrate the Icelandic tradition of Jólabókaflóð, or the Christmas book flood.
To take part in Jólabókaflóð, exchange books with others on Christmas Eve, then spend the evening reading those books and eating chocolate. What a perfect combination!
6. Create and give memory books.
This can be done many different ways. First, choose a book that imparts a message specific to the receiver (such as Oh, the Places You’ll Go for someone in college, or You Made Me a Mother for a new mother), then have people sign each page of the book and write a related message for the receiver. For someone in high school or college, you could have teachers and coaches write the messages, for a new mother, friends and family would write the messages, and so on. You can even space the messages out—for example, yearly (during the schooling career), or monthly (during the pregnancy).
7. Volunteer to read at senior living facilities, children’s hospitals, or after-school programs.
Reading to others is a great tradition to start during the holidays—or you could even make it a tradition that takes place during the middle of the summer just to shake things up.
8. Celebrate Buy Nothing Day instead of Black Friday with a book swap.
Instead of going shopping on Black Friday, get together with friends and family to do a book swap. You get a new book to read without having to spend a penny.
What book-related traditions do you have? Let us know in the comments below!
Happy reading!
I think I’m ready to move to Iceland!