Holiday meals are a wonderful way to introduce your children to your family's roots. Every culture has symbolic or traditional foods that are integral to their most important celebrations. The children might not yet understand prayers, or songs in foreign languages, but they know what tastes good, and they remember these special foods from year to year, whether it's matzoh ball soup, Christmas ham, or Aunt Jean's special New Year's hoppin' John.

When you serve traditional foods, explain to your children what they are. Try to involve your children in the preparation, so they'll understand what kinds of ingredients go into the meal, and why. For example, a traditional borscht may help your children understand what kinds of vegetables grow in Eastern Europe, and what the climate is like.

Make a conscious effort to serve traditional foods at holiday time. You may want to innovate with a few dishes, but in general, children in particular love the holidays because they find the same foods year after year, and that helps them understand tradition and continuity.

Sadly, sometimes traditional dishes are lost because our generation never learned to make them or considers them too time-consuming. For example, my mom's Czech mother and grandmother always made pierogies at Christmas and Easter, but my own mother never learned to make them on her own. A few years ago, as my grandmother neared her 84th birthday, I realized I had take down the recipe, complete with every little nuance about how to get them to taste identical to hers.

That year, I began the tradition of pierogie-making anew with my boys. My sons helped make the dough and we used our pasta machine to roll it out, which saved a lot of time. As we rolled and filled over 300 pierogi, we chatted about my childhood holiday memories. When the pierogi's were served at my NYC holiday party, I tasted my heritage in every bite. As for my sons, they loved eating them as much as they did making them.