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How did your new traditions get made?
I was chatting with a friend about Thanksgiving. Neither of us find the holiday relevant to us, so this year we're going for something health-oriented (somewhat off-theme, but we liked it). I'd love to have lots of traditions, but I didn't grow up with them. If you found a tradition later in life, how did it come about?
So my wife is a hardcore-atheist jew, but her extended family was Christian, and aquired a few traditions from them. I was an ex-Luthern hardcore-atheist, but am now atheist-jewish by osmosis. Namely, because my kids are also atheist jews (it's matralinial in this house). So for the most part, we came up with new traditions that suit our weird family better.
The story of Hannakah, for example. There was no miracle, just a community that conserved the heck out of a scarce resource. So for us, we modernized it, and we celebrate by conserving as much electricity as we can....given how that's the closest proxy for lamp oil these days.
One of the traditional Passover lunches is Ham and Cheese on Matzah. Because my wife and her sister would go to Christian Grandma's house during Passover occasionally, and that's what they asked for....because Christian GMom makes the best Ham and Cheese (confirmed later by me).
We both liked the candy and treasure hunt aspect of Easter, but the religious aspects are completely pointless to us, so the Saturday before Easter is Pirate Day, where we setup an elaborate pirate-themed treasure hunt for our children culminating in them sword-fighting me for their big box of treasure.
Christmas for us is mostly just an excuse to hang pretty lights, enjoy having a tree in the house, and give our kids a few presents. I've started buying smaller living trees that can be planted afterwards. A tradition that formed in December is nightly walks or short drives looking at Christmas lights, culminating with driving around on the 21st listening to all of Dark Side of the Moon.
Kids knew from the beginning there was no such thing as Santa, but we explained how lots of people like to "play Santa" with their families, and thus it's not OK to tell another kids that Santa isn't real, because that's between them and their family. Incidentally it's the same general approach we took towards God when that question came up. Santa is the perfect God metaphor folks, no need to Keep The Christ in Christmas.
To actually answer the question: Traditions tend to come up organically, and are rarely spoken about. They often just start off as a casual "hey wouldn't it be fun to..." In our minds, a tradition isn't really a tradition if anyone really needs reminding or coercement. We don't do traditions because "tradition", we do traditions because we find value in the activity itself.
Go hiking this weekend. Maybe Thanksgiving Hike will become tradition. But it won't be this year.
Haha, I thought everything beforehand was a great answer! I agree with your direct answer, but I was more interested in testimonials. Sort of like you write, I have 3+ cultures (maternal, paternal, then where we live, then religion if you want to include it). Reading everything, I think my family didn't do a great job of actually engaging with either culture, whereas it sounds like you did a great job with adapting and understanding Judaism (judging by how you explained the lamp oil adaptation).
I do think some traditions are forced and that has its own value too (where the inherent value ends up being the history). But perhaps I'm still too young / my friends and I are in a stage where environment and circumstances change too much for traditions to really emerge.
Many years ago, I made myself a stuffing bowl out of Thanksgiving leftovers. It was stuffing topped with a layer of gravy, cheese, and sour cream. My sister looked at me in disgust until I convinced her to try a bite. We'll be making some muffin-sized stuffing cups tomorrow! 😁
No Thanksgiving here in the UK but for many years, for assorted family reasons, I didn't spend christmas at home with my then-girlfriend/now-wife. When we eventually did have a christmas that was just us in our house together, we had to invent some new traditions. Some of them are amalgams of family traditions we both already had, some we made up because we felt like it, some just happened naturally and kept on going.
My favourite is our christmas eve meal of meat pies, cheese and crisps. That happened because I had messed up the christmas food shopping and that was all we had without dipping into the christmas day food. But we've done it now for years, and it's one of my favourites.
I can imagine you lot arguing with friends over what the best crisps are for Christmas Eve tea.
"Quavers are not on the damn list!"
Quavers are absolutely not on the list although I would entertain the idea of Wotsits, but only if the other crisps are something pretty fancy to balance them out.
What's nice about it is that it's flexible, and I think the best traditions can adapt to different times and situations. Last year we were at my in-laws for christmas eve and despite them having a completely different traditional meal, they put out a little bowl of crisps so we could keep our tradition going. My sister always has a fondue on xmas eve and when they were with us, we had a fondue with bits of pie and crisps (and other fondue stuff).
This might be the most heinous thing I've heard all year. 🙃 Although that's not saying much. Swedes are quite reserved when it comes to their own outlandish opinions (on crisp flavours).
Need to get yourself some Tato crisps kidda.
My wife and I do something similar, we have a floor picnic and it's odds and sods we get from various places the week before Christmas.
You get a veritable feast as well.
Not sure I've ever seen Tayto for sale around here although since brexit my local supermarket has an Irish food section (presumably because it's easier to import from Ireland than anywhere else) so I'll keep an eye out.
I live within walking distance of Kettle Chips UK so we tend to get all their experimental flavours in our corner shop, which can be... interesting. Although their pigs in blankets flavour was pretty good.
Might modify the xmas eve meal to be a floor picnic this year, that's a great idea. The Kid loves a floor picnic.
My father used to be married to a woman called Imogen (not her real name), who was a wonderful stepmother for me and my sister. Because they (I assume mostly Imogen) wanted us to be part of her extended family's Christmas, the whole family (which means a lot of people from several nuclear families) changed their Christmas to December 23rd. It was quite beautiful for them to do that, and I'll never forget this. So me and my sister had two full-blown Christmases every year, for many years, with presents and everything.
And then my father had a daughter out of wedlock. That was the second time my father's cheating blew up a family I was part of. My mother was the first victim.
They still invited me for Christmas every year (which was still December 23rd because it ended up being very convenient for other divorcees). I went once. The enormity of the damage my father had done was overwhelming. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for a good part of the night.
So the tradition still exists, but I'm not part of it.
I'm not sure I like Christmas all that much anymore.
These lines from vord beautifully sum it up. The closest I have to a tradition is that my best friend and me make short vacation togeter every year. We are best friends since kindergarten and never lived more than 10 min by car from each other away, so both of us value this friendship high above everything else. Originally it started to go to one football (
soccer) match in a random city and have two nights in that city around it with a third friend, but after that friendship had ended we just continued, and by now it's not centered about football anymore. I value this small vacation very much as it's too important to spend time with people you love. We didn't do it for the pandemic and this year, but we booked a vacation to London for next year in turn, so the longest distance since we went to Istanbul ten years ago.Me and my SO used our kid being born as an excuse to not visit family during Christmas like we used to do every year - and found it stressful to be "on" all the time. "It's so hard to travel with a newborn" etc. That got us out of that tradition.
Then we figured out that why the hell are we eating traditional Christmas food on Christmas when neither of us actually like it? It was just tradition and habit.
Now (a good decade later) Christmas in our family is still just hanging out with the family, eating everyone's favourite food and just relaxing. If a grandma grumbles about not visiting, we visit in the beginning of December to keep OUR tradition alive =)