Give my kids a holiday, and they will live every minute of it at full volume. The sandcastle gets built and rebuilt. The hotel pool becomes an ocean. The gelato gets ordered in a language they learned twenty minutes ago.
And then we come home, and the suitcases get unpacked, and life resumes its regular programming: school runs, lunch boxes, the calendar filling itself back up like it never left.
For a long time I thought that was just how holidays worked. You have them, and then they’re over.
This year I’ve learned that the holiday
isn’t over when you get home.
{Tweet that.}
It turns out the coming-home part might be where half the magic lives. Researchers who study happiness talk about something called savoring, the deliberate act of returning to a good experience and sitting with it a little longer. When kids revisit a happy memory, that retelling is doing real work. It carries the experience from a fleeting moment into something more permanent, something that becomes part of how they see themselves and their family.
I’ve watched it happen at our kitchen table. My oldest will describe the exact shade of the water at the beach we visited in January, a detail I’d already half-forgotten. My middle one remembers the man who sold us mangoes and how he cut them into flowers. My youngest, who is barely four, remembers that Daddy fell off the paddleboard, and she will remember it, joyfully, forever.
Every time they return to those moments, the moments get stronger. The trip stops being seven days in the past and becomes part of the ongoing story they tell about who we are: we are a family who does things together. We have adventures. We laugh at Daddy.
Lingering on memories does something else, too. It slows kids down. Revisiting a holiday through photos, through stories at bedtime, through drawing and coloring the places they’ve been, asks them to sit with one thing instead of skipping to the next. In a world that hands them a new stimulus every eight seconds, there is something quietly radical about a child spending twenty minutes inside a single memory.
So this year we’ve built little rituals of lingering. We tell “remember when” stories in the car. We let the kids pick one photo a week to talk about at dinner. And they each have a coloring book made from our own holiday photos, so the afternoon they spent chasing waves can become an afternoon spent colouring them in. Their memory, their hands, their colors.
The suitcases are long unpacked. But around here, the holiday is still going.
If you’d like your kids to linger a little longer on your family’s adventures, that’s exactly why we started Outline Origins. Upload your holiday photos and we’ll turn them into a custom coloring book of your beach, your mountain, your gelato, shipped to your door for small hands to bring back to life.
