I say that word and I can hear Tevye singing in “Fiddler on the Roof,” bellowing out his approval of one of the abstract things that keeps many of us with our keels in the water and our sails upright: tradition.
On the other hand, just as many of us delight in breaking tradition whenever we can. Sometimes, we rebel because we truly believe that what has always been done is not relevant, helpful or something that should be carried on. But, c’mon, admit it, sometimes we just do it to be ornery and get a rise out of our fellow man or woman. Right?
It used to be that weddings took place mostly in churches and funerals in funeral parlors, but not anymore.
I recently heard of a funeral for a man who loved to fish. He requested everyone come in their fishing clothes, ready to tell their best fish stories. And the attendees were treated to a shore lunch.
There’s a town in North Carolina where the local funeral business is owned by a retired fireman. He has a collection of vintage vehicles, including a couple also-retired firetrucks. You can be driven to the cemetery with all sirens blaring, if you wish.
And weddings. In our family, they’ve been on a paddlewheeler tooling down the Mississippi, in the front yard down by the creek, in a lovely pine tree-encircled glen, on top of a Colorado mountain and on the shore of Lake Superior in the middle of March. Maybe not traditional, but much more suited to the people taking the vows.
Speaking of family, strangely enough, tattoos come to my mind. When I was growing up, back in the last century, tattoos were something you saw in National Geographic magazine, or maybe your uncle, who had been in the Navy, had an anchor on his bicep or a Hawaiian dancing girl who would wiggle when he flexed his arm muscle. Wow!
Now, you are in the minority if you don’t have a tattoo. There are 14 members in our immediate family, and all but three, maybe four, have tattoos. Even this octogenarian. My daughter and I have matching forget-me-nots on our right wrists. The rest of the family has Viking ships, flowers, snowflakes — you name it.
And our patriarch is a dermatologist. Now, it used to be that dermatologists hated tattoos because they often got patients who needed to have them removed for one reason or another. The only way to remove a tattoo, before lasers, was to surgically cut it out, resulting in a pretty big scar.
When Tom was in med school, rotating through Hennepin General in Minneapolis, a young woman came in, a desperate look on her face and a guy’s name on her arm. Her husband was a Marine nearing the end of his stint and would be home in a few days. That was not his name on her arm. She said he’d understand a scar from a fight better than his best friend’s name tattooed on his wife.
There are some traditions from my childhood and growing up years that I wish would still be practiced. For one, almost every other Sunday evening, we would go to my grandpa and grandma’s for Sunday night supper. We’d sit around the kitchen table and have sandwiches or soup, made from leftover Sunday dinner.
But the thing that never changed was the coconut cake my grandmother always made. When I look back, it was kind of unusual and probably not the best. It had a hard, white shell for frosting with shreds of coconut embedded in it. But I loved it and looked forward to it.
Sometimes, I would stay over with them, especially in the summer. Every single night, before he went to bed, as the mantle clock struck 10, my grandpa would have crackers and milk. I would watch while he crumbled the square saltines into a bowl and, with a flourish, pour the milk over them. Then I would do the same.
Yes, they got soggy and mushy. They tasted all right, but yuck, soggy and mushy has never been my favorite. But my grandpa did it, it was a tradition, so it must be OK. And Ritz crackers were not the same. I know. I tried them. They moosh even faster.
You may remember doing this one: After you had spent all day putting up the Christmas tree, struggled with the lights and had flung the last of the tinsel, all to the mood-setting music of Christmas carols and Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” (tradition!), you turned off all the house lights, switched on the tree lights and sat in the warm, pine-scented dark, thinking of all the past Christmases and the many years of doing this very same thing. I had friends who always slept beside the tree the first night it was up.
That reminds me of the tree-topping tradition and ceremony that happens when a building under construction reaches its ultimate height. A small pine tree is fastened to the highest spot on the bare roof joists and stays there until the house is finished. We did that when we built our log house, a lovely tradition.
But I’d be willing to bet that your family didn’t call each other up every year at midnight on New Year’s Eve and shout “Blwyddyn Newydd Dda! (pronounced “Bloo-thin Ney-widh Dha”) That’s “Happy New Year” in the Welsh language.
There’s a
YouTube video explaining how to say what I just said,
in case you’d like to start a new tradition. You should probably give your family and friends a heads-up first, though. Some traditions translate better than others.
If you enjoy Claudia Myers’ column, you may like her book, “The Storyteller Has More to Say,” available at claudiamyersdesigns.com. Claudia is a former costume designer for The Baltimore Opera and the Minnesota Ballet and has taught design and construction at the College of St. Scholastica. She is a national award-winning quilter, author and local antique dealer, specializing in Persian rugs.