Stepfamilies are all around us. One in three Americans live in a stepfamily, and more than 50% of Americans will live in a stepfamily at some point in their lives. Thirty percent of children are growing up in stepfamilies.

The tenth annual National Stepfamily Day will be marked on Sunday, September 16, 2007 with picnics, proclamations, and activities celebrating what draws our families together – love, camaraderie, joy, and even adversity. It encourages all members of a stepfamily and helps build strong families.

A community event in honor of National Stepfamily Day can bring together stepfamilies and help educate the community. Your company, church, neighborhood association or nonprofit agency can sponsor a picnic or event for stepfamilies. Fire up the grills and hot dogs, bring out the potato sack races and goofy games, and publicize your event to the community.

Besides organizing a community-wide picnic or your very own backyard barbecue, there’s lots of ways your stepfamily can get involved. Make a special dinner featuring a menu saturated with family favorites, and make it each year for National Stepfamily Day. Create a photo scrapbook about your stepfamily, with each member contributing a page.

You can make a “Blending of the Sand Bottle” with your stepfamily. One by one, have each member of your stepfamily pour colored sand into a bottle. Watch as the colors stack up to form pretty patterns. The finished bottle represents one united family.

Make a set of family steppingstones to install in your backyard. One of my stepmom friends did this as an activity for her stepdaughter’s birthday, and I still get the warm fuzzies when I see those cute little steppingstone mosaics in her garden. All you need to create them is a plastic mold for each stone, cement, and broken glass or stones.

If your stepfamily is struggling, you can even use this event to reach out to hurting stepfamily members. Write a card or make a call, but do what you can to connect and communicate that you care.

Ask your local Board of County Commissioners, city government or mayor to issue a proclamation in honor of National Stepfamily Day. Sample proclamations and more resources are available online at www.nationalstepfamilyday.com. Then write a letter to the editor at your local newspaper thanking your local officials for supporting stepfamilies and suggesting more ways your community can help stepfamilies. This is also a great opportunity for local news media to publish profiles of stepfamily support groups and to write or broadcast features on stepfamilies.

State and national proclamations are being requested by Christy Borgeld, who founded the event in 1997. She married her husband Jim fifteen years ago, and soon discovered that blending two households with six children was not easy. Borgeld notes that unlike the Brady Bunch, blended families often don’t mix easily, nor do they automatically come with a housekeeper!

National Stepfamily Day may be a few months off – but mark your calendars now. It provides an opportunity for to celebrate the things that we love about our families, gives us an opportunity to celebrate our bonds together, and demonstrates to the greater community that stepfamilies are here to stay.

Dawn Miller writes a column on life in blended families at thestepfamilylife.com. 
Visit Dawn's blog for a daily dose of life in the blender.
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