Today I am continuing on with answering transracial adoption questions from some of my blog readers. You can go on over to this post and leave a question of your own if you have one you would like to ask or if you have a topic you would like me to write about.

The question I am going to answer today is:

I now see the AA Santa's, AA Nativity sets, etc. How do you balance the holidays?

First off, while the holidays may seem a world away right now as we prepare for back to school and are cramming in a few more weekends at the lake, reality is that the holidays are just a mere three to four months away, and everyone knows how fast that time tends to go. Plus, my kids are watching a Christmas movie on Pay Per View right now, so I am in the mood to write about this one.

So how do you handle incorporating culture and race into your holidays? The question above is specifically about decorations, so I will start there.

We have a wide variety of Christmas decorations. We have Asian angels and black angels on our Christmas tree, along with the white angels I have had since I was a little girl. We have ornaments for our tree from Vietnam, Korea, Africa and other places. We have a Polish Santa Claus, a black Santa Claus and several other "ethnic" Santa figurines. We have all sorts of different Christmas music from a variety of cultures, time periods and music styles. Our holiday decorations are truly multicultural, as is our family.

We did not go crazy buying tons of stuff after our first transracial adoption, but we have gradually added to our decoration collection.

Food is another area of the holidays where it is easy to incorporate different cultures. Food is such a huge and important part of any holiday celebration anywhere. We love to add favorites foods of our African American daughters (who lived down South until they came to be with us) to our menu. We also love to add Asian dishes from Vietnam and Korea. Since the addition of Benjamin and Belane, injera and doro wat are favorites too!

I am pretty traditional when it comes to Thanksgiving, however this year for Christmas we are already talking about doing an "international buffet" sort of dinner. We'll let all of the kids help pick one dish to help make and put the menu together as a family.

We have not celebrated Kwanzaa yet as a family, as it is not a holiday that our African American children had celebrated in their birth families, however we have talked about it some and I think it might be fun to make a new tradition out of.

If you are looking for new, ethnic traditions for Christmas, here is a post I wrote last Christmas time about a great resource for that.

What I have found to be most important around the holidays is to make new family traditions, along with carrying on with some older ones. The first years that our older adopted children were home were difficult in some ways, because some of our kids were able to say, "Oh, every year we do so and so for Christmas," and they were traditions that our "new kids" had not ever experienced.

We have had a lot of fun coming up with new family holiday traditions that really bind us together as a family and make everyone feel that they belong. Some things are very simple, like orange rolls and cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and some are more involved, like our treks into the woods to cut down our own Christmas tree.

Now that Mercy and Des have been with us for three years and Ben has been here for over a year, they love to talk about the things that we "always do" as a family for the holidays. Traditions are such a great way to strengthen bonds in a family.

If you have recently adopted an older child (or are in the process) I suggest you ask them what they remember about past holidays and what traditions they would like to carry on with in your family. It is also fun to plan some new traditions with your kids, as well as to preserve past traditions that are important to you.

Holiday decorations, foods and traditions are all fun ways to incorporate your child's culture into your family, and to have holiday celebrations that represent your multiracial and multicultural family.