Ancestry Magazine

Question: Say you’ve been stuck in your car for hours during a blizzard and your accelerator keeps sticking and can’t be unstuck. You finally escape the snow by stopping in Reno where your car gets towed and getting it back cleans you out. Now, really, why wouldn’t you just cut the road trip short and go back home?

Answer: This is no hypothetical question—it’s a true account. But it’s not even half the story. Our engine nearly blew up from the stuck throttle, we walked miles in biting cold to get our towed car out of hock, and my wife slipped and seriously hurt herself falling through the cracked-up, unlit boardwalk outside a shady towing joint. And to boot, we eventually spent the night in the car in Truckee, buried under four feet of snow.
More to the point, the answer is that we—my wife, a brother, another college pal, and I—were headed to my sister’s home in Berkeley, California for Thanksgiving. So of course we carried on. We had no choice: it was the day before Thanksgiving. And it was tradition.

You may not know why traditions exert such power over us, but you know they do. If you don’t think so, try skipping your birthday this year. Hole up during Hanukkah. Or spend New Year’s Eve filing old bills and pay stubs. Chances are you’ll feel bereft and disconnected and thrown out of your personal orbit. When you love a tradition, when it feels timeless, you will take great care not to miss it—or you will sorrow if you do.

The Power of Tradition
Peter de Schweinitz, a physician raised in Palo Alto, California, told me about an Inupiak man in Alaska he recently treated. The man was developing a serious case of diabetes, and Peter told him that he needed to give up his diet of whale blubber. The man looked at him and said, “That is one thing I cannot do. This is who I am.” He had always hunted and eaten in the traditional way of the Inupiak; he was the physical embodiment of that way of life. The hunter would rather keel over from diabetes than give up the traditions that, in both a physical and spiritual sense, defined his identity.
The strength in many traditions, both religious and secular, can express itself in a number of ways. For instance, for Muslims, the month of Ramadan is not only a time of fasting from sunup to sundown, but a much anticipated and joyful season of forgiveness, almsgiving, and family togetherness. Eyad Hasan, a Palestinian-American living in Dearborn, Michigan, says that during this time, “the daily fasting is not difficult at all—it’s easy.” To understand the vitality of Ramadan, and the energy and excitement this tradition generates, Eyad says, “imagine a Thanksgiving holiday that lasts a month.” He mentions how his family reunites over sumptuous nightly fast-breaking feasts. Relatives visit and give gifts or money. The family goes to the mosque together for prayer. And at Iftar (the time after sundown when meals are eaten) or for Eid al-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, there is always the eating of favorite foods—dates, kunafa, falafel, baklava, and others—with family and friends.
Ramadan’s strength as a tradition goes beyond giving its participants the ability to fast and learn self-discipline. In a time of closeness, sharing, and goodwill, barriers break down much more quickly, and wounds have a chance to heal. Eyad’s father died an early death, and for some time the family was unable to speak about him. However, gradually, at family gatherings such as Ramadan, when siblings got back together, it became easier to talk about him, and in time everyone could reminisce and call up favorite memories.

Living Traditions
Once upon a time, folklorists saw traditions—from songs and folktales to holiday customs—as remnants and relics of a mythic past, kept alive and handed down in “broken” form by peasants. Today, folklorists know that traditions of all kinds are not only fundamental to every kind of group’s identity, they are also consciously and unconsciously shaped in meaningful ways to meet those groups’ needs and wants.
Raji Siraj’s experience exemplifies a conscious shaping, in this case by turning to a past tradition to make a new one adapted to her needs. Raji is an Indian woman who lives on the Eastern Seaboard. Married to a Muslim man for the last seven years, she says she did not follow her traditions, or practice religion, for several reasons: “Our interfaith marriage, our network of friends who do not observe, our lack of courage to express traditions, and our pursuit to internalize spirituality.”
After having two daughters, Raji felt a need to bring her children religion, to teach them about India’s rich heritage, and to begin a family tradition. She says, “As I grow older, I realize that I am losing my rebellious nature, and am becoming more aware of my need to connect. . . . I am also realizing the value our traditions tried to teach, how they bring communities together.” So she determined to introduce her daughters to the nine-day festival of Navratri, a tradition primarily for women and children that Raji loved while growing up.
Raji took her daughters to a friend’s home for this festival last year. The girls loved it and asked her to carry the tradition forward. So this year, for the first time, she took steps to celebrate this nine-day festival at her home. She feels that observing Navratri helps her teach her daughters “that women have many strengths, and that each strength has its value.” And to show her daughters the need for women to value each other, she has altered the tradition somewhat to include every woman—even those who do not usually take part in the tradition. Because she began this tradition consciously, it now means much more to her.

Continuing the Tradition
If you already have a good tradition, nourish it, and it will nourish you. (This seems especially true of foods.) The continuity of a tradition turns it into something much more meaningful than a one-time event. Each time we perform a particular tradition, we add to the pool of memories associated with the experience, and relate those memories to whatever happens to be going on in our life. This continues year after year.
Jen Skoy’s father grew up in a Norwegian community in Minnesota. His mother was a gourmet who cooked traditional Norwegian meals and lavished the food on others as a way of showing love. When Jen was young, her grandmother would make, at Christmas, rosettes (a crispy treat cooked in oil), sandbakkles (a fruit- and cream-filled pastry), and lefsa (a Norwegian potato pancake that requires a special rolling pin, grill, and lifting stick). Jen’s grandmother also taught her son and grandchildren how to make these treats, and soon, the foods became a beloved part of the season.
As Jen’s grandmother grew older, Jen’s dad took over, making the lefsa dough, forming balls, rolling them out, and cooking them. He would do this every day for the three days before Christmas, making enough for everyone to eat all they wanted. When Jen’s dad died three years ago, it was Jen who took over the role of making the Christmas lefsa and other Norwegian foods with her mother and brothers and sisters. What once symbolized Jen’s Norwegian heritage has, with the passing of family, come to mean much more.

Timeless Traditions
Certain traditions mean more to us than others, of course, although all traditions have their value. But what is a timeless tradition? It’s not a question with a single answer—each person has his or her own say. For me, however, it’s a tradition that I cannot imagine doing without.
Peter de Schweinitz offers his own personal example. “A timeless tradition,” he says, “is one that feels like it can’t be lost, that’s not rushed through, where there’s no sense of time.” For Peter, it’s the magic of sitting around the Christmas tree as a family and eating snacks like chips and guacamole, with only the faint lights of the tree and the candle-driven angel chime making its soft music. “You knew you would do this at no other time of the year; you knew that you would never find your parents sitting on the floor with you—it could only happen at that moment.”
But with every recurring event, there comes a caution—even the most revered tradition can become stale or routine over time if the meaning isn’t regularly rekindled, or if new meanings aren’t invited in.
A group with living, meaningful traditions is a group that is alive, dynamic, and much better equipped to weather life’s storms. And whatever those storms may be, it’s clear that traditions are how we share and hand down the things that mean the most to us. The human need—the same one that caused me and my family to brave the meteorological, mechanical, and monetary breakdowns and continue onto Berkeley—to create tradition as a way to celebrate our core values, our love for others, and our shared experiences. That is what is timeless.

Andrew Bay manages CultureGrams editorial operations at ProQuest Company. His favorite tradition is eating the foods of every ethnicity.