As my children age out of the family nest, I’ve spent — wasted, really — energy thinking about family traditions. Did I preserve traditions I grew up with? Did I invent new ones worth remembering? Does any of it matter?
When I posed the question at a recent family dinner, the immediate consensus was that we had no traditions. Sure, there are a couple of annual holiday gatherings, but nothing that rises to what I think of as a capital-T family tradition. No extended family reunions, tickets to The Nutcracker, or game nights.
Pressed further, one son identified two decades of summer trips to Charleston that petered out once they had better offers. Someone else pointed to my “special French toast” — with a recipe I decline to share — reserved for special occasions and sometimes made by special request. A love of the Yankees was instilled in me by my husband, who took me to my first baseball game early in our relationship.
Can’t these be traditions?
It’s not that I didn’t try. They still laugh at what I billed as ‘Carlin Family Fun Day’, where I armed each with a personalized color blaster for a watered-down home paintball game. Clearly not destined to become a tradition, it was shot down as lame. My newly inaugurated pre-Thanksgiving dinner Bingo games are tolerated, along with martini glasses of strong Cosmos, which promote family harmony. Frankly, I wish I had established a ‘family clean out the house and toss your crap day’.
Funnily enough, when I started inventorying family traditions from my youth, I realized that I didn’t have many to pass down. A holiday meal at my grandparents’ apartment — featuring an obnoxious cousin who twisted my arm repeatedly (and literally) — is not the stuff of fond memories.
My mother taught us all to play tennis, but we never quite made it to family doubles. There were summer ventures to the Catskills and Tanglewood when I was young enough to claim I don’t remember much, where I may have had my first brush with secondhand weed, though not from my parents. But nothing I would have called a tradition, even if it was one.
That’s the thing, though. Maybe traditions are just family life at any given time — only recognized later.
The idea of an annual visit to the Bronx Zoo lands very differently for a six-year-old than for a sixteen-year-old who refuses to go. But those road trips to look at colleges build connections and memories, even when no one calls them traditions.
What really came out of my questioning was that traditions didn’t seem to matter in the way I thought they would. My kids didn’t care about naming or preserving them. They cared about showing up, being together, and more than occasionally complaining about it. Which may be another way of saying we didn’t lack traditions at all; we just never bothered to label them.
My husband, who had listened to all of this at dinner, later asked me why I had asked the question in the first place.
