Where Traditions Come From

When my daughter, Alanna, asked me where we got the tradition of putting up our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving, neither my husband nor I could remember. It just seemed that in all our married life we always did it that way. It might even come from our lives before we were together. Isn’t that true of many traditions – we do them, but we don’t know how they got started?

In one of his sermons, my husband, Dave, tells a story of passing down traditions from one generation to the next. Do you know the one about tying up the cat? You see, many generations ago, people would put out a saucer of milk for the gods and tying up the cat so it wouldn’t drink the milk. The next generation put out a saucer or milk and tied up the cat. They knew to put out the milk and tie up the cat, but not why. The third generation just started tying up the cat – forgetting all about the milk.

Or, maybe you know the one about the lady who cut the ends off the ham before baking. Her husband asked her why she did that and she said she didn’t know but her mother always did it too. One day, the husband asked his mother-in-law why she cut the ends off the ham and she said because her mother did the same. Finally, they asked the grandma why she cut the ends off the ham and she said so it would fit in the pan.

Traditions are important as a way of learning to do things and as a connection to history, but it is also important to start your own traditions when you marry and combine families. They need to fit your family’s needs by tweaking old ones or starting new ones. In our family of four, the tree and outdoor lights go up the Friday after Thanksgiving; we have lasagna on Christmas Eve and sometimes open one present on Christmas Eve. We have turkey on Thanksgiving – never ham. I have a friend who serves spaghetti on Thanksgiving because that is what her kids will eat.

One tradition we started when our girls were little stemmed from Dave’s memories of opening presents on Christmas morning, getting dressed and going to one set of grandparents’ home for lunch and more presents and then off to the other grandparents’ for dinner and still more presents, but never getting to really play with anything until the next day. He did not enjoy that tradition so we threw it out. Once we had children, we had one set of grandparents over for Christmas Eve to enjoy dinner and church. They spent the night, we opened gifts on Christmas morning and they were free to stay or go, but the girls stayed home and play with all their new toys.

Once Dave joined the Air Force, of course, all that changed because we lived far away from home. We started another tradition of having cinnamon rolls Christmas morning while we opened presents – a very relaxing, unrushed holiday.

As our family grows, we will tweak our traditions more and encourage our girls to start their own. Last Christmas Marissa brought her boyfriend, Andy, home for the holidays along with another friend. To help them feel at home, we included some of their family traditions. Andy has Frosted Flakes cereal with vanilla ice cream and strawberries for breakfast. If that’s what he wants, that’s what he gets. We’ll do the same this year when he joins us again.

Traditions are important to connect people and times. We may not always understand where they came from, just that it’s always been done that way, and so we continue what has been passed down from generation to generation with a few changes and combinations that form to make new traditions that fit together nicely with the old.