Chocolate and cheese.

A look at our traditions.

My family doesn’t have many traditions. I know people who always watch the same movies around Christmas time - usually Love Actually or Harry Potter. Maybe you’re a Die Hard kind of person. But my family doesn’t really do that. We put a tree up, we do all the decorations. But there’s not one album that we cling to or repeat. There is no repeatable structure that defines what our Christmas looks like.

I’m struck by the influence tradition has on us as individuals, though. I’m sitting in a friend’s home as he prepares to get married. It’s the Friday before a Sunday wedding and candles are being unwrapped, chairs are being delivered and floors are being swept. This friend of mine seemingly shares my lack of one household favourite Christmas movie, but a larger tradition unites us.

His fiancée’s dress is white. She is wearing a veil. She had a kitchen tea. These are all larger social traditions that we choose to follow. They exist in structures that we elect to replicate in our own lives. I had the pleasure of attending the groom’s bachelor party, where we first ate chocolate cake, then ate a meal comprised only of meat, and then promptly played poker and listened to jazz into the small hours of the morning. These little archetypes that we fall into are perhaps less of a choice to be methodically implemented in our lives, but are shared behaviours that unite us nonetheless. How many bachelor parties in history have omitted vegetables? Likely all of them.

I like being a part of stories that unite us, like weddings. When I get married I will also have flowers on the tables, I will also wear a suit. Just as my parents and their parents did. It doesn’t particularly matter to me that I don’t play Micheal Bublé every Christmas, but I really want to be apart of big, generational, social traditions. I will also panic when my first child is born. I will also cry when they become a teenager. I am also a person, and I will also get to experience life in a beautiful and meaningful way, similarly to many who have come before me. Those are the traditions I care about.

There are little traditions I want to start in my family, my wife and I will have special songs or days or meals, I’m sure. And I intend to pass those onto my children so that they can remember me when it rains or when they eat pizza. I will leave you with one treasured family tradition I can think of. I remember when I was a kid, I was sick enough to stay home from school one day. It was really rainy and cold. My mom rented a DVD (I know, right) and made us toasted cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate. We watched the movie, bundled up in blankets, as the rain streaked our windows. Now, sometimes when it’s a cold, rainy day, I’ll make a toasted cheese and a cup of hot chocolate and remember that day when we stayed inside and cuddled up on the couch.