Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

What are your favorite traditions, large and small? What is it about your traditions that keep them going strong for you?

One of my favorite summertime Ledcat & Sue traditions was “Ice Cream Sunday” – after dinner, we would head over to Klavon’s Ice Cream in the Strip District. Sometimes we would invite friends to meet up with us, sometimes we took a dog. We didn’t do this every single week, but often enough that it was an unofficial tradition here at Lesbian Central. After Ray Klavon died (very sad), it was not the same. The new owners have expanded the hours starting on St.Patrick’s Day so we may revive this tradition to try and jump start spring.

*For the record, we do sometimes go to other ice cream spaces. Has anyone else noticed that Dairy Queens seem to be plopped down in horrible traffic scenarios? 🙂

As a same-sex family, it became apparent early on that we were still expected to be the flexible ones and meet everyone else’s needs on holidays – be they frail grandparents who couldn’t travel or young children. After a few years of this, I suggested we create some of our own holiday traditions that were about us as a family and carve out some time for us to be together on these holidays.

So, we have blueberry muffins from Priory Fine Pastries for breakfast on holidays. In a pinch, we’ll substitute with Giant Eagle muffins (which are pretty good) but it is a small thing – sometimes we have them in the kitchen and sometimes we pour our respective caffeinated beverages and watch a parade or other holiday television.

We also have dinner together. Our familial obligations can gobble up the mid-day hours and that’s fine, but we start and finish the day together in our home or at a space we choose. So we start with muffins and end with a Honeybaked Ham dinner on Christmas Day. The food is great, but it is more about the tradition of being together. Last year on Easter, we had waffles for breakfast at Waffles Incaffeinated and ended the day at the Green Day concert so dinner was Subway in the car. But it was great.

Other traditions?

• We celebrate a lot of occasions at Legends of the North Shore. The food is always great and the staff know us so it really adds to the festive quality. They’ll do some extra nice touches like a complimentary slice of pie for a birthday or something small just like the chef and the sous chef coming over to say hello that make it a really nice occasion. And the food – OMG – that’s a celebration in itself.
• Every New Years Eve we debate going to the local First Night Celebration, then we typically end up at home b 9 PM watching television countdowns. But we do watch the local ball drop on KDKA.
• Every holiday season, we watch the Kennedy Center Honors together. That just happened, but now it is a must-do thing.
• I personally like to watch the “Celebrate the Seasons” Parade on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That’s a personal tradition.
• We’ve also developed a Super Bowl tradition of making our own wings and buying chips (which we never do) and watching the commercials.

Some of our traditions have just evolved from shared interests (like watching “60 Minutes”) while others were more conscious decisions and choices.

One tradition is the even after ten years together, two adult women who are not married and do not have children are very much last in line when it comes to planning any family anything.

My favorite tradition? Taking pics of Ledcat wherever we go. I have hundreds of snaps, many of which I’ve shared on this blog and various social media channels. Because I don’t want to forget a single moment.