Small Town Traditions

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My son graduated high school last week.  I have been attending open houses to celebrate graduations for four weeks now.  I have had comments asking about the open houses.  Some people had never heard of them.  I decided to do a post to talk about the tradition.

We live in a small town.  My son's graduating class had about 110 students.  This is a large class compared to the classes in the past.  Due to a statewide policy now you can attend school anywhere in the state not just in your district.  The school gets to choose whether or not to accept you.  They can set guidelines that you must meet to be accepted if you live outside the district.  Our school is one of the best ranked schools in the area, which means we have a lot of students outside the district applying.  We have only been accepting students for about 4 years.  Our classes used to always be under 100 students.  Our classes were usually around 60 to 70 students.

The tradition surrounding graduation is that most students celebrate their graduation with an open house.  They used to always be held at the students home.  Parents are so busy anymore that many of them are renting a building to have the open house.  The parties are spread out over a number of weeks so that more people can attend and not as many parties are overlapping.  So far, I believe, we have attended well over 20 parties.  We still have a few more.  

My son graduated with 29 students that he had attended school with since kindergarten.  That is a low number.  When my older children graduated over 2/3's of their class had been together all the years they attended school.  We still have more parties to attend tomorrow and next weekend.  

I have had a hard time maintaining my healthy eating since it has been constant parties every weekend.  

After the open houses were over with tonight, one of the parents held a bonfire and party for the parents.  It was a chance for parents to unwind after having our children graduate and the work put into hosting an open house.

It was a little too warm to be close to the fire.  

We also attended open houses for my son's friends that have played travel baseball with him over the years.  They are spread out at other schools around our area.

There are probably open houses for students who go to large city schools but I believe since everyone in our small town all know each other we probably attend more of the parties.  We still had to select which parties we could attend since there are so many going on.  It is impossible to attend everyone's open houses.  Most people who attend the open house bring a gift for the students so it also gets to be expensive.

One of the open houses we attended today was for two students who chose to combine their parties.  They probably had over 200 people in attendance.

So, these parties are lots of fun and their is so much food that it makes it difficult to eat a healthy diet.

I didn't do too badly today.  I have been trying to stay away from any of the sweets.  I am also trying to stay away from wheat.  I am not sure why but after I ate the cake from my son's open house my weight has just stayed about the same.  My weight loss seems to have become stuck.  I am reading the book The 100.  Maybe it will give me some ideas to boost the weight loss and get going again.