Creating traditions

Periodically, you'll hear about something being a "new tradition." This is a perfect example of internal contradiction, where the combination of ideas negates all meaning.  There simply is no such thing nor can there be.

I think what people mean when they call something a new tradition is that they want to start something new, but that it relates to some traditional form. That's fine, I guess, but things are usually traditions for specific reasons that can't just be created out of thin air or whole cloth or whatever cliche you'd like to insert. The Harvard-Yale football game, and the revelry that surrounds it, is a tradition because they've been doing the same thing over and over again for a really long time. I'll bet you that in 1875 nobody was saying they were going to start a new tradition, or creating a soon-to-be traditional rivalry. I'd bet that nobody really gave it any thought for many many years.

Usually, what happens is that people do something, think it's cool, and say, let's do that again. Then it grows organically from there until it's finally thought of as a tradition. I suspect that many minor holidays developed this way, and Thanksgiving certainly did.

We've never really had a big Thanksgiving thing in my family. I'm pretty sure we always did the whole turkey thing, but it was never as big a deal as, say, Pesach. It was never a "let's everyone get together and make a family meal" kind of thing. It just wasn't the way things went.

As much as I may feel deprived because I rarely had the kind of big, warm, family gathering that's described to me by friends, I can't just decide that I want to suddenly have something like that and then just make it happen.

This became vivid to me when my mom got sick about 10 years ago. My mom and I were never super close, for a variety of reasons. We got along fine, but our relationship was nothing much more than that. So when we found out that she had ALS and would be declining steadily, I was struck by an urge to pull close. But after a couple of visits and some consideration, I realized that we weren't close for a reason. The relationship was mature and had not been changing for the previous 10 years, so why should it change now? Was I going to try to create something where nothing existed before? It struck me as arrogant to think I could do such a thing,  and silly to think that I would do it.

So now, 10 years later, I have little regret for that decision. My mom has many admirable qualities, some of which I am proud to have inherited. But there was no chance that I was going to be able to create a new tradition of closeness between us, even if I really wanted to.