Our personal holiday traditions are often the things that bring real joy. There are certainly broad, sweeping traditions that have been adopted en masse, but often it’s the quirks of our own lives that dictate what feels most special.
It feels strange to me, for example, to put up a Christmas tree before December 13, because my childhood trees always had to wait until after my brother’s birthday.
In maintaining traditions, though, it’s important to make sure that rituals don’t become a prison.
When all the meaning is lost, or you do something inflexibly because “that’s how it’s always been done,” then tradition stops being a pillar that upholds life, and becomes the anchor weighing it down.
This has been a year of disrupted traditions, but maybe that opens the door to looking at which ones are worth keeping, and which ones can pass away.
