Today’s newsletter is a dozen lessons we’ve learned from our favorite family ritual:
Every Friday night our family eats pizza and watches a movie….
In the beginning, there was pizza, but no movies. My youngest son would get too sad or scared or upset to sit through a feature film. “One day,” I thought, “One day we will be able to all sit down and eat pizza and watch a real movie together.”
That day came during the first Christmastime of the pandemic, when the youngest was approaching age six. We started with gentle, short viewings, like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Muppet Family Christmas, It’s A SpongeBob Christmas!, and even Elf. (My log notes that “Jules cried, but we made it through.”)
In 2021, when the boys were 8 and 6, Friday night pizza and a movie truly became a family ritual, something we looked forward to every week, something we did almost without fail.
Somehow we’ve been doing this for five years?!? Wild.
The letter also includes my logbooks and recommendations from each year:
One of the most prudish things about me: I think people introduce movies to their kids way too early.
Read the whole thing here.