Grandparents Day and Remembering Where We Came From
Grandparent’s Day is here and that means we get the chance to honour and celebrate the lives of our parents’ parents. We get to consider their lives from close up and continue to preserve the wondrous variety of ways that they’ve helped make us who we are today.
Grandparent’s Day has only been around for a few years, but it’s a holiday that finally pays the proper tribute to the architects of our families and the keepers of our beloved traditions. It’s a chance to do our part to transmit our family traditions as well, so that future generations can benefit from our grandparents as much as we have.
But the question is– how do we achieve what they did? Well, in a way, we do it just the way that our grandparents did– with the materials at hand. We preserve the keepers of our family traditions by using technology to save memories that are now digital. We preserve these blessed memories by using technology that can keep pace with the Herculean efforts our grandparents made to establish them in the first place.
Seeing the Past Through Different Eyes
The focus of the big day should be completely on them — on their personalities, their vitality, and how they communicate. You’ll want to preserve as much of it as you can, so you start preparing in advance. In the weeks leading up to this day, you leaf through their photo albums, their old love letters, and grandma’s journal that brought you to both laughter and tears.
And at some point, you realized it was more arduous to preserve traditions in their day. You understand the sacrifices they made and want to perform a similar service for those who come after you.
Grandma and Grandpa wrote letters in elegant handwriting to each other, while nowadays, people email or text. If Grandpa wanted to tell you about something he experienced as a young lad, he simply told you while you sat there in awe (and you wondered half the time how he had escaped those hair-raising adventures!). If Grandma wanted to share a recipe with you or your mother, she wrote it on a piece of paper, or, if this was a family secret, made you or your mother memorize it and swear to secrecy that the only thing that would be known of this dish was the mouth-watering taste.
After a few days in your grandparent’s attic, your excitement bursts at the possibilities of immortalizing these memories, of immortalizing your grandparents. You carefully place the photos, the letters, and the old 8-millimeter film reels and starting planning for their special day. And finally, you’re ready, or as ready as you can ever be to capture the beauty of fleeting moments.
Living Up to Your Grandparents’ Example
Grandparents Day is a time to reflect on on old memories and fashion new ones. It is one of those special days when you might meet grandma and grandpa at their house for a nice dinner, take them out to eat, or plan a picnic in the park where you can take grab some sweet, candid photos.
But whatever you’ve decided to do, you’re prepared to do the same sort of work your grandparents did to preserve this memorable day. You’ve brought along your mobile device (now filled with the newly digitized photos, love letters, and digitally converted home movies) and warmed up Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any other social media platform you might be using to share your life with those that you might inspire.
You do all this for the same reasons that your grandparents took so much time writing those elegant letters — so you can freeze as many sweet moments as possible and share with your own children and grandchildren. And once you’ve frozen these moments, you gather them in a commemorative collage that will literally take you hours to decipher, organize, and finally arrange into a beautiful gallery, showcasing that idealistic love you’ve always dreamed about, but have only ever seen on TV.
Slow Things Down with Kumbu
To celebrate this Grandparent’s Day, the collage will start with the past you’ve gathered from the attic, and end with photos and memories from mere hours before at their picnic.For a moment, Grandparent’s day looked to be a bit too much of an undertaking, but instead of relying on umpteen different social media programs to collect pictures, journal entries, and movies wasting away in a musty attic, you decided to use the one program that works on Facebook and all social media applications with one specific purpose: to catalog our lives in pictures and writings.
The logistics of all the social media applications and devices was, at first, almost overwhelming. But when using Kumbu to manage all your grandparents’ memories from one central location, you can sit back, upload and import with a few clicks, and watch your grandparents love story evolve. And for the first time in your life, you caught a glimpse of how you want to be remembered.
