We love the Fall. Like…LOVE it. We even drove 4,000 miles round-trip just to chase the colors and crisp air! We also love dressing up and being out in the community with our neighbors.

As a culture, we have so few traditions that we celebrate largely as a community. Halloween is something we wanted to participate in but at some point, it just stopped making sense for our family.It’s not for lack of desire; we just kept arriving at a place where what was being celebrated combined with the sugar, the food dyes, and the increasingly ghoulish decorations meant that it was not a cultural fit for our family. We tried swapping out our kids' candy, then we tried only giving out better-for-you candy. We tried only going down certain streets or to certain houses. 

In the end, it made sense to create something new: Fall Party. 

We created Fall Party out of a desire to celebrate the harvest season fully, with good food and great fun. We just celebrated our fourth year of Fall Party, and it is beautiful how this tradition has come to shape the culture of our family. We look forward to it, and we build upon it. One year, we made our own caramel and dipped apples; one year, we did sourdough pizzas. This year, we did our ancestral chili, lard crust apple pie, and added apple bobbing, and whatever you call trying to eat an entire donut without it falling off the string.

Some day, we hope to open up Fall Party to our community to celebrate and share in this nourishing tradition with them, too! 

I hope this encourages you in two things: creating family traditions is beautiful and worth it, and you never need to feel guilty for saying no to what doesn’t fit your family’s values. Who knows what you might make room for when you do!