Day Forty: How Do We Define Tradition?

Tradition is something that many of us take very seriously. Holiday traditions especially are prone to a transition from habit to a type of family law. Yet, they also are prone to changes either by desire or circumstance. For most of my life I believed in abiding strict holiday traditions, but then factors began to enter into it that did not fully allow those beloved and time honored routines to continue.

The year that my Mother died, I spent my first Christmas ever away from my own family. Instead, I stayed with my friend Janelle's parents and celebrated Christmas with them. I will never forget their generosity and sincere kindness in including me into a time usually reserved for family. It's not that I did not love my own family, I just was not ready to be without them without my Mother present. That was the first year for me that things truly began to change.

Since then I've spent a few random December 25th's with the families of a boyfriend as well as two with my husband's family, and this year I will see my family, but I am staying with and spending Christmas morning with my friends Colleen and Chad and their family. Though the best non-traditional Christmas I ever spent was a few years back with the husband in Negril, Jamaica. It was the best vacation of my life and the best Christmas, despite there not being a shred of personal tradition involved.

So why the dependence on tradition? Is it a type of superstition? A creature comfort? An attempt to keep things from changing? That is not an easy question to answer and one that I am woefully underprepared to take on. What I do know is that every year of my life, until the year my Mother died, I ate a hand-decorated, cut-out sugar cookie made from my Mother's recipe. Growing up it was a tradition she and I shared together. There would be a breakfast, but before that and after the gifts were unwrapped, she and I found a moment to have a cookie. We usually baked and decorated them together, in fact I do not remember a Christmas before those cookies and our Mother-daughter breakfast moment.

As an adult I kept up the tradition until the last few years, when travels interfered. This year there will be no cookies for me and no husband either, no traditions at all really. Yet Christmas, like life, will go on. So do we really need our traditions to tell us what to celebrate or what mood to celebrate in? Can we still enjoy the season without the familiar routine? Maybe tradition is a crutch, maybe it's just a relic of times past. As someone without the option of fulfilling past traditions I am learning how to enjoy life as it comes, even when you  may not want to. Ten years ago today I was falling asleep in a foreign house, prepared to wake up to a Christmas morning with a family not my own and tonight I find myself in the exact same situation.

I am tempted to believe it is simply a matter of my not growing and building a life of my own, but I think it's really a symptom of my desire to seek out real friends and family on a special day even if that means redefining the meaning of both. I won't have that cookie, the husband, that silly little silver tree Mom put in my room every night and that I took with me when I moved, but I will have love and laughter. I will also have a family of both heritage and friendship to share the day with and maybe that's what the true legacy of tradition should be.