Opaque Lucidity: Tradition

December 21, 2004

Tradition

I was raised in a Catholic household where my father was of Italian ancestry and my mother's family was Irish. I didn't realize it at the time, but our lives were full of traditions. We almost always had spaghetti and meatballs on Sunday and mom almost always made cabbage on New Year's Day. We didn't call these little things traditions or even discuss them; they just were. As we grew older and my siblings began raising families of their own, these things went away and were replaced by other traditions. Such is life.

I feel about traditions much the same way I feel about legacies: you don't go out and create them. They find you. I am leery of anyone who says, "We're going to start tradition X right now." It's a feeling in search of a home, something that almost always leads nowhere. Traditions exist because people embrace certain activities or beliefs, thus leading to repetition.

Let's take traditional Italian food, something with which I am very familiar. When the first Italian immigrants came to the United States, they didn't say "Let's create comfort food from our homeland and call it traditional food." The food they cooked was the food they knew, so they stuck to it. It was good food and was pretty cheap, so it was popular. Thus, the tradition was born on this side of the ocean.

Around the holidays, forced tradition (especially from people who think that tradition formation will somehow solve problems or bring families closer together) does nothing but make things more complicated and more strained. Things have a way of working themselves out; one day you look back, and you realize that a tradition has begun and you didn't do anything except live life.

Posted by Matthew at December 21, 2004 01:54 PM

Comments

After you get married most wives don't like the tradition of guys staying out late chasing skirts. And forget about bringing those skirts home after you catch them! No one is petitioning for that tradition.

Posted by: sly at December 21, 2004 03:43 PM

That's why girls who have their own place are so popular. Besides, if she's doing a good job, why would you rather be elsewhere?

Is it true that men are only as faithful as their options?

Posted by: troy at December 22, 2004 12:23 PM

I'm weak! It's genetic!

Posted by: sly at December 22, 2004 08:23 PM

To quote my Great Aunt Mary, men are like horses, they will stop and drink at any trough.

Posted by: sly at December 23, 2004 09:19 AM

I don't remember many skirts getting caught.

Posted by: Erik at December 23, 2004 04:14 PM

That's a good thing.

Posted by: sly at December 23, 2004 10:31 PM

Why catch them when you can order them. Right?

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