Importance of celebrating occasions

 

I have talked about the Importance of celebrating Festivals in my previous article. And that leads me to the idea of sharing with you, how significant “occasions” are in our life. On the one hand, when celebrating festivals, we move closer to our faith and roots; celebrating occasions deepens the colour of our relationships.

I have usually seen that celebrating occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. do not happen in every house. Most people carry the idea that birthdays are celebrated only for children. Or why do we need to do a lot of things on their birthday? You would have commonly heard the statements like “Is this an age to celebrate a birthday?”, “What’s there to celebrate in an anniversary?” etc. etc.

Well, I believe that life is beautiful and it’s gifted to us just once. We should not leave any opportunity to make it big. In a sense, we should create as many lovely memories as we can, so that when we look back, we should not feel that “oh! Time just passed”. I wish I could have done things which could have made me happy in my life than doing everyday tasks.

Occasions are not limited to Birthdays and Anniversaries only; the event can be any. The first day of your job, the day your child got an appreciation letter from the school, the day you achieved a goal in your life be it personal or professional and any event which you feel you want to memorialize.

"You don’t need a big event to celebrate, celebrations make small events big in life". 

Like we haven’t celebrated Christmas, but my daughter started liking Santa Claus and Christmas tree when she saw it in her school. She felt excited to decorate her own Christmas tree. And to continue her excitement, we bought her a Christmas tree. Now she decorates this tree every year for Christmas.

Here is the list of all things, we do as a family to celebrate occasions... 

1. A lot of surprises are planned well before the actual day by everyone in the family

2. Every gift gets wrapped with a lot of excitement and love

3. A day before, we work on decorations

4. We bake a cake (The picture in the blog is of the birthday cake I prepared for my daughter 😊) or prepare a special sweet of choice, for the person.  

5. We cook a few favourite items for the person

6. We plan the day’s menu as per the person’s choice for breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner

7. On the event day, we start giving the gifts from the morning and continue till the evening. There is an excitement in the air. Everyone is eager to bestow their present and see the reaction. The person is in the state of surprise the entire day.

8. In the evening we have a small party. If we have invited someone, we plan accordingly. If it’s just the family, we sit, eat and have warm conversations.

And this is how the day ends with laughter, happiness, excitement and beautiful memories!

Routine life will always go on, and we all will be busy every day. But just a little switch in perspective can change everything. 

Don’t tie down yourself by age, society or anything else. You are what you create out of your life, not what people think of you.

In the end, we won’t be worried about the laundry we did, the dishes we cleaned, the meetings we attended and the money in our bank. We will be concerned about the memories that we are taking with us.

We should not come to a point where we think...

“How we did every little thing which was needed, but we forgot to celebrate and live a life truly”.