Traditions: Here Today, Here Tomorrow

I came across this article titled "Traditions: Here Today, Here Tomorrow" in a local magazine and thought it was just so true and so well-written t hat I just had to share it. I hope you enjoy it and can relate as well as I did! Thanks to the author Donna Acquaviva for allowing me to post it.

Our pastor gave a sermon the other day against – of all things – tradition. He didn’t He didn’t exactly say we should give up our traditions, his point was that if we’re going to do something over and over and over again, we ought to know why we’re doing it. To make his point, he told (probably apocryphal) story about some natives on a Pacific Island who used to go outside their huts every day at dawn, turn to the rising sun, spit on their hands and raise their arms to the sky. When a visitor asked them why they did that, they said they didn’t know. They had simply always done it. I knew another pastor like those natives. His reason for saying “no” to anything new, creative or innovative was “Tradition is important.” And so he wanted to do things the old tired way even if they’d lost their meaning. I was serving on the parish school board and most of us were constantly frustrated by this attitude. After one confrontation, I bought a poster lettered in old English script in dull shades of mauve, purple and pink that said, “But we’ve always done it this way.” I sent it to him anonymously. My sainted mother – and I’ll bet you have one a lot like her – hangs on to traditions long after everybody has outgrown them. We kids all helped carve pumpkins and bake the seeds long after Halloween parties and spin-the-bottle games were more important to us than jack o’lanterns. We dyed and searched for dozens of Easter eggs years after we, worried about cholesterol, stopped eating them. Of course, as a Mom I not only adopted some of mom’s family traditions, I established a few of my own… For instance, on Christmas Eve mom would read the Bible story of the first Christmas to us, and then (remember, this was before movies like “A Christmas Story” and “The Grinch”) we’d sit around the Christmas tree in flickering candlelight and listen to Lionel Barrymore’s magnificent version of “A Christmas Carol.” By the time we grew up we knew the whole album by heart and would quote great chunks of it all year ‘round. Asked why something was not working, one of us would respond, “An icicle must have gotten into the works.” Queried about a lost object we’d say, “Well, it’s not in the old dressing gown that’s hanging in a suspicious attitude against the wall.” But when my own kids were smaller, that beloved old record album had to compete against television and it was nolo contender. So I invented other things to do on Christmas Eve. We had a small wooden manger in which the kids would place handfuls of clean straw every night during Advent – IF they’d been good to each other that day. Some days were so bad that they’d have to take straw OUT – but that’s another story. On Christmas Eve the youngest child would tenderly place in the manger a baby Jesus doll so old and used that it was bald and its empty eye sockets stared like Little Orphan Annie’s, swaddled in one of t heir own worn baby blankets. We’d say a prayer. Then they’d turn on “Frosty the Snowman.” And I knew the times they were a’changin’. But until a few years before she died, my mom was still mourning that nobody wanted to listen to Scrooge anymore. I learned how to let go because I saw how unhappy it makes you when you can’t. Then there are traditions that aren’t traditions at all. Like the time my husband, who was working for the Maryland Division of Tourism at the time, visited an old Episcopal Church on the Eastern Shore. He noticed a slight groove in a stair front of the alter, and tucked into a groove was a delicate silver thimble. “What’s that for?” he asked the tour guide. “Oh,” she said, “the ladies who mend the alter clothes use it.” Bob suggested that it might be more romantic if visitors were told that the thimble is part of wedding services instead. “Tell them,” he said, “That the bride slips her finger into the thimble during the service. If it fits, it means she’ll have a happy domestic life. If it doesn’t…” Years later, he visited the church again, this time with a different tour guide. “And here,” she said picking up the thimble from the groove in the marble step, “is one of our oldest traditions. During the wedding ceremony, the bride slips her finger into this thimble. If it fits, it means she’s going to have a happy domestic life. If it doesn’t…” Her voice trailed off meaningfully. And I’m sure if you were to challenge a Maryland Eastern Shore Episcopalian bride about why she bothered to put a thimble on her finger during this most solemn of ceremonies she’d say, “But it’s tradition. We’ve always done it this way.” Indeed.

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Traditions: Here Today, Here Tomorrow

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