When you think about it, didn’t scrubbing the bathroom as kids teach us a lifetime of work ethic? This week on the What a Gift podcast, we're diving into the daily routines and intentional rituals that shaped our lives. We're getting honest, we're getting real, and we're unwrapping the gifts hiding in traditions and chores.

🎁 WHAT’S INSIDE 🎁

The Gift of Chores

We begin by discussing the gifts found in household duties, reflecting on how both our fathers, who had served in the Navy, enforced a strict ethos of chores. Jule unwraps the gift of chores, recalling the family standard of Saturday chore day. Jule shares her resentment over having to clean the hall bathroom used by her two brothers (noting that they somehow can never pee directly into the toilet) while her brothers got to mow the lawn. Sarra recounts her own experience with chores, sharing that while growing up she sometimes felt like an indentured slave to her parents, the duties taught her skills, contrasting her experience with that of a former roommate who, upon finding a lamp bulb had burnt out assumed the entire lamp was broken.

The Gift of Traditions

Sarra unwraps the gift of traditions, stating that traditions help carve out special moments and prevent a week or a year from becoming a "blank homogeneous blob of days". Sarra shares a tradition from her time on a FOCUS team, where birthdays were celebrated with a special breakfast and a personalized song written by her team director and campus minister. Jule visualizes holidays as the "little special squares" on a Candy Land board of life. Jule remembers her mother’s dedication to building traditions, such as lining up in age order before opening Christmas presents, and singing "O come, O come, Emmanuel" during Advent dinners. The conversation focuses on the infamous Coppa Family Easter tradition, which was a highly competitive basket hunt requiring participants to follow a trail of cryptic, rhyming couplets written by Jule's dad. Sarra relates her own traumatic Easter story where her dad hid her solid chocolate bunny in an outrageous location.

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