Cherished Traditions

The winter holidays including New Year celebrations are days steeped in traditions, traditions that hold together memories of the past and hopes for the future.

It isn’t really Christmas for my wife until she makes the traditional Swedish Christmas cookies that her grandmothers and their grandmothers made. Part of my wife’s joy is anticipating the Christmas in the future when our grandchildren will join her in making those cookies.

There are traditions like the Swedish Christmas cookies that we are born into, and then there are traditions that become our own over time. One of the favorite holiday traditions in our family is watching the film version of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” based on the poem by Dylan Thomas.

The film version transports us back to Wales in the early years of the twentieth century. The film is based on Dylan Thomas’ poetic memory of a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day from his own childhood in those innocent years before the world was plunged into World War I.

No one in my family is Welsh, but after faithfully watching this program for thirty years or more, we feel very much like we’re revisiting our ancestral home. Dylan Thomas’ genius was in sharing a memory that, in one sense, was his own experience, but a memory shared in such a way that we feel that we too lived for the two magical days of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in that same village.

Another tradition from another culture that my wife and I adopted is the New Year’s parade of fire that the Scottish village of Stonehaven puts on each year. More than fifty years ago, when my wife and I lived in Scotland, a Scottish friend brought us to this village by the North Sea to experience a New Year’s tradition that goes back maybe two hundred years.

Thanks to the internet, we—and you, if you’re interested—can virtually experience Stonehaven’s yearly tradition as the clock strikes the first minutes of the new year, Scottish time. Even if you missed it live, it’s still available online. Bagpipers lead men and women swinging flaming baskets on long chains over their heads as they process down the village’s main street. The tradition symbolizes burning out the bad spirits of the old year and giving the new year a fresh start.

I appreciate the tradition in Stonehaven now more than I did when I saw it in person five decades ago. I suspect that this is true of all traditions; they aren’t appreciated until a person has experienced them over many years.

In 1972, I was a new grad student, feeling more than a bit homesick and worn down by being repeatedly stared at, a six-foot-four-inch American in a country where most men barely reached five foot six or seven. Not really understanding what I was witnessing back then, I suspect I focused on the considerable danger of people swinging baskets of fire so near children and families who lined both sides of the street.

Now, it doesn’t seem like New Year’s unless we return to Stonehaven via the internet to witness a tradition that is celebrated, despite its dangers, as it has been for perhaps two centuries. I have little doubt that the same tradition will be carried on hundreds of years into the future. If there was one thing I learned in our three years in Scotland, it was that the Scots cherish their traditions.

It is tempting to describe traditions such as Dylan’s poem and Stonehaven’s fireballs as “timeless.” Actually, traditions are time-filled, the present moment repeating what was done in the past and anticipating what will likely be done in the future.

Traditions, then, open us to magical time, moments when we understand life in a deeper way. When we participate in traditions, each of us becomes a link in a chain that might go back centuries and will continue long after we are gone. In those moments, our ancestors are with us even as we are connected to descendants long into the future.

If you have the opportunity to relive a tradition this time of year, don’t miss that chance. Traditions ask little of us—to remember, to repeat, and to lovingly pass along that which has grounded us in our short lives.