Traditional Disasters

I long for tradition—for celebrations that are important to our family because they have endured over time. I can’t begin to tell you the number of “traditions” I have attempted to start in our family over the past twenty years. We’ve been through “Food From Around the World Night” where I scoured international cookbooks and pushed my cooking skills to the limits in order to bring new and innovative food to our family dinner table. Mostly my kids looked at the food like it was something nasty they had found stuck to the bottom of their shoe and I wound up shoving the leftovers down the garbage disposal while my husband lectured the kids on how lucky they are to live in the United States where we have choices and freedom. Family game night didn’t work out any better. My kids are spread pretty far apart age-wise so it was hard to endure the eye rolling by my teenager while we played go-fish. I stopped that gem of a tradition after three weeks when I caught my boys hiding their Gameboys behind their Rummy Cube boards.


The holiday traditions I’ve tried to foster have included family Christmas shopping, attending a live nativity and car rides to look at the Christmas lights. The shopping was exhausting. My son would inevitably try to explain why his little sister really wanted an army dude or a jeep with removable wheels. He got so involved in his sales pitch that he cried uncontrollably when I said no. The live nativity was too cold and my boys kept making jokes about the animal’s rear ends, so it wasn’t as touching as I’d hoped. But the car drive to see the lights was probably the worst. By the time we’d finished driving a few blocks the kids had spilled hot chocolate all over the car, my daughter was crying because the boys kept correcting her singing (in her world it’s a onos slippin sleigh), and my husband was holding the steering wheel like he was piloting the Titanic just waiting for the ship to go down.

Needless to say I’ve never gotten any of the good traditions to stick. I’m a wimp and I just can’t see it through. I’ve been forced to pretend such lame traditions as “Sunday Movie Night” have meaning when it’s just an excuse to get all my kids into a dark room so that they’ll take a nap and leave me alone. I’ve also played the “tradition” card in order to make my life easier. For instance we all unwrap Christmas gifts together, one gift at a time. I tell my children that it’s a tradition to watch each other open gifts so that we can say thank you appropriately. But the truth is that I do it to drag out Christmas morning so that my kids don’t start with the “I’m bored” talk until at least early afternoon. That way I’m less likely to turn into a shrew who yells, “Do you realize what I paid for all that stuff under the tree—well, do you!!?” and wanders off to my room with a Dr. Pepper and a set of ear plugs.

Which is why I’m so grateful for Thanksgiving. It’s a tradition dating back to the colonies and has been somewhat perfected over the years. Families gather, they smile, they laugh, and they pause for a moment in their busy lives to remember why they’ve been working so hard—for their families. Sure, it’s really just a big dinner, like our movie nights are just naps, but maybe we need permission to enjoy the people who matter most in our lives. Plus, it’s a tradition that the kids do the dishes—you’ve got to love that.