My family doesn’t have a lot of traditions that have carried on, although we do still do our big family get-together at our house on Christmas Eve, so I guess that counts. Here’s James Lileks‘ take on the tradition question at this festive time of the year:
Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.
There are two views of Christmas traditions.
1. They are the jewels of the past, polished by time, handed down from loving ancestors whose memory we e’er keep warm and and alive when we do as they did, eat as they ate, and raise our new wine in the glasses of yore. Thus do civilizations maintain, and remember.
2. Traditions are the cold hands of the dead past punching through the coffin-lid of yesteryear and bursting up through the loam to reach out and smother the newborn ideas of today, because that’s not how Grandma did it.
I’m very much in the first camp, stamping around like Tevye in the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof. But I share his perplexity some times. Why do we do this? I don’t know. I don’t know why we always had Swedish Meatballs on Christmas Eve. Perhaps that was Grandpa’s favorite, and my Mom made it after he passed to remind herself of him. If so, cool; my daughter, who never met the old man, experiences a little of the remarkable old farmer – especially since I insist that she wash it down with a warmish Grain Belt and smoke an Old Gold afterwards.
“But I don’t want to! They smell and they make me cough!”
“It’s tradition. Your grandfather would be delighted to know you enjoy the rich, apple-fresh flavor of an Old Gold.”
Ahhhh, kids, it’s hard to get them interested in history. Even harder to get them to knock the ash in the coffee-cup saucer. My point is that we are not having Swedish Meatballs this year, because Daughter wants to make some German dish. It’s a roll of pounded meat layered with mustard and pickles. (Not to be confused with the German meal of mustard and pickles wrapped up in hammered meat; that one has more syllables.) I have never been impressed with German food, but this dish has the promise to provide a piquancy missing in Swedish meatballs, which seem like something that answers the question “what if the telephone dial tone was a flavor?”
