Fablr

Questions to ask

Questions to Ask Your Grandparents About Holidays and Traditions

The dish nobody else could make, the year the power went out, the tradition that started by accident.

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A grandmother and two grandchildren fold holiday dumplings at a flour-dusted kitchen counter, with a handwritten recipe card beside them.

Start with the food

A family tradition feels permanent until the year someone realizes nobody knows how Grandma made the stuffing, or why the family always eats at two o’clock. Grandparents are often the last people who remember how a tradition started.

Holidays are also easy to talk about. The memories are warm, specific and full of people, so they make a good first conversation for a grandparent who is shy about bigger questions. Ask about the food first. It almost always leads somewhere.

Before you sit down

  • Ask while you cook together. Busy hands make for easy talk.
  • Bring an old recipe card or ornament and ask for its story.
  • Ask about the holidays of their childhood, then the ones they hosted.
  • Write recipes down exactly as they say them, “a handful” and all.

Growing up

  1. What was the biggest holiday in your house when you were a child?
  2. Who hosted, and who was at the table?
  3. What did the house smell like that day?
  4. What present or treat do you still remember?
  5. Was there a holiday that went badly wrong? What happened?

The food

  1. What dish could only one person make right?
  2. Who taught you to make it? Did anyone write it down?
  3. What is the ingredient nobody else knows about?
  4. What did you eat the year money was tight?

Traditions

  1. Which of our family traditions started with you?
  2. Which ones came from your parents, or from the old country?
  3. Is there a tradition you let go of? Why?
  4. What did you do on a holiday when you couldn’t be with family?

Looking back

  1. Which holiday from your whole life would you live again if you could?
  2. Which traditions do you hope we keep?

A tradition lasts when someone knows the reason for it. Ask for the reason.

When you want these stories kept with their recipes, Fablr can hold the conversation by voice, and when they add a photo of the recipe card, it asks about the story behind it. You might also like these questions to ask your grandparents about the 1960s.

At the kitchen table, a granddaughter scans the printed code on a chapter of an open Fablr hardcover with her phone camera.

If you would rather someone else asked

A biographer who asks the next question.

Fablr holds these conversations by voice, at whatever pace suits them. It follows up the way a good listener does and remembers what they said last time. The stories become a hardcover, with a code on each chapter that plays it in their own voice.

Conversation
15 hours over one year. No schedule.
The book
Full-color 8.5×11 hardcover, included. Free US shipping.
Price
$149, billed once. No auto-renewal.
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Questions, answered.

During the holidays, while the food is cooking. Or a few weeks before, so there is time to ask for the recipe.

Ask about all of them. How a family changes its traditions is part of its history.

Yes. Children ask unexpected questions, and grandparents tend to answer them.

Give them a year set aside for stories.

$149 billed once. No auto-renewal. 30-day money-back guarantee.

Give Their Story $149