Tradition? Tradition!

What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?

Traditions are very important to many people. Repeating rituals on an annual (give or take) basis, passing on those traditions to the children so that they are preserved by the family. Sometimes, when traditions drop away, people lament their passing as if a piece of them died and fell off.

Yes, the zombie reference is deliberate because sometimes traditions are like the walking dead. They continue to appear and move just like they had before, but there is something missing. The outward signs are still there, but the essential life or soul of the ritual is gone.

Thinking back to the holiday traditions of my childhood, I don’t recall any that survived. We celebrated holidays in the usual ways (Easter eggs, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas decorations), but those sloughed off in later years. Once, when bringing Thanksgiving dinner “with all the trimmings” to my mother in her nursing home, she put up such a fuss (I don’t know why) that that was the last time we did that.

Likely the main tradition that I rejected was church-going. Every Sunday, up early, get dressed, walk to 10:30am Mass, and sit in the front pew (center section, right side). We’d stay to the end, unlike those half-heathens who would get Communion and head right out the door (thus avoiding the second collection and the traffic jam in the parking lot). Then home to break our fast, because in those days you weren’t allowed to eat before receiving the body of Christ. I don’t know the source of that idea but it seems as ridiculous as the rest of the church-going ritual, and is nothing that I ever miss.