“Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.” Erma Bombeck

One of the best parts of Christmas morning for me, and my rather large family, is opening all of the gifts in our Christmas stockings. I make an effort to fill the dozen or more red furry boots with at least a few off-beat trinkets that might elicit a laugh, and my family does the same when filling mine.

Last year I received a “Growing Jesus”; complete with a “Hallelujah!” and Scripture verse on the package: John 3:16. Just drop this miniature Jesus in water and watch him grow!

This year, I got Animal Crackers.

My first response of, “Oh, how cute,” was quickly stifled as another thought took its place: “My mother loved animal crackers.”

As I placed the little red box on the coffee table next to me, I looked down and noticed my mom’s feet in my mom’s slippers and remembered a priceless quote from Erma Bombeck: “I pulled a sweater on this morning and my mother’s arm came out through the sleeve.”

Yikes.

As the gift-giving went on around me, I could hear the little voice in my head wondering, “Just how bad is it?” By the end of the day I realized it was worse than I thought. Now paying attention, I became more aware of the gestures, phrases, and habits that once belonged only to my mom.

Somehow she had passed them off to me without my knowledge!

I wondered, “Will I do the same to my own children?”

Of course. It’s a fact of life. My sons already save cardboard boxes.

But it’s not always just the little things that get passed along. Often we find ourselves walking the same path our parents walked, making similar decisions, adopting similar mindsets.

Just look at Isaac, son of Abraham— who symbolizes the ideal of obedience to the will of God. Isaac journeys through the land of the Philistines to Egypt during a time of famine, just as his father did, and continues to find himself reliving many of the events of his father’s life.

Isaac stops in Gerar, the Philistine royal city and speaks to the king, Abimelech; a king who bears the same name as the king Abraham dealt with almost a generation earlier; Isaac passes off his wife as his sister, reminiscent of his father, and similarly, comes into conflict with his neighbors and is later reconciled with them.

But the event that strikes me most is Isaac, encamped in the wadi of Gerar, re-digging the wells his father Abraham had dug before him. Isaac even calls the wells by the same names his father had chosen so many years ago.

A commentary on the Torah explains, “Isaac’s pilgrimage is a familiar one to many middle-aged men and women who find themselves coming more and more to resemble their parents in appearance and behavior as they mature and coming to understand why their parents did some of the things they did.”

Parents do leave us with a legacy, which may be a burden or a blessing, or a little of both. Though we may not be able to avoid all the similarities, we have the gift of parents’ wisdom and foolishness, successes and failures, and the ability to consider each as we choose our own paths.

There is no doubting that our parents travel with us on our journeys, but choices we make with an awareness of the past and a plan for the future will ensure that the journey is more ours than theirs.

For me, recognizing that I am morphing into my mother isn’t so much a concern about being like my mom, who was a beautiful, intelligent, compassionate woman, but the realization that time, is in fact, marching onward, and I want to make sure that the “me” of who I am doesn’t get lost on the trip.