traditions are what we need them to be
When my daughters needed to report to their 4th grade teachers what their family traditions were, I sank for them. I thought I had failed to create those pillars of stability that every child needed to rise up into adulthood whole.
We never have the same Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner menus ever. Sometimes we light Hanukkah candles, and for years we forget. We didn’t return to the same vacation island or lake every year, and we didn’t ski in the same place more than twice. The only vacation tradition that holds is that I, wife and mother in this family, don’t do them well, which is a confession for another post.
But after worry and examination, I realized we actually do have traditions - and they are good ones - but they are untraditional: We may not get Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners right, but we always - as if it’s biblical - have panettone for Christmas breakfast and lentils for New Year’s Day, traditions not born from my own family but something I started as a single person after traveling to Italy. Since 1982 I have never not done these things because they meant something to me about travel, deliciousness, friendship, and luck.
A tradition born of a missed flight, a lot of fighting, and then a consequential drive through the darkest hours of the night in a rental car from JFK airport to Boxford, Massachusetts, Billy May’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Mambo means Christmas to my children more than anything else. My husband and I got through Connecticut’s empty 2 a.m. - 4 a.m. with this song on repeat, and it probably saved our marriage.
When we are sad we watch “Music & Lyrics” with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. I dare you not to feel better 30 seconds in.
So, it’s affirming to realize that traditions don’t need to be what 4th grade teachers expect; they need to be something with which as a group or a family you mark points in the calendar; they are devices our tribe shares that reliably cheer us up.
And now this family has a January tradition - although I’m not quite sure if it’s our tradition or the tradition of the local florist, Celia’s Flowers, who remembers without fail every year to ask me if I am ready for the quince blossoms.
My mother planted an orchard - heavy with quince trees - in her Boxford, MA back yard. She was complicated, but the best thing she left me is the story of quince. You can read more about all this in my “about” section, because I carry my mother’s quince mantle; sometimes the traditions come to you, uninvited.
My mother died in January ten years ago, and someone sent me quince blossoms in her memory. The following year, my husband brought them home and they have continued to be as important to January as the Christmas tree is to December.
Inevitably, there is a blizzard, and there the blossoms are, a flush of delicate spring against winter’s harshest efforts. Metaphor-ready, contrasting their spiky branches and clustered blossoms against the arctic winds and snow beyond the window, these branches honestly make storms better. They are a device that serves many purposes - they remind us of my mother and they reliably defy New England winter every year. And they remind me to give thanks. Thank you, as ever, Celia’s Flowers. Thank you, Mom, for this best part.
