Traditions, Teens, and an Untragic Tale
My mother was never quite ready for Christmas. Christmas Eve was often a flurry of rustling bags and wrapping paper. But one thing we always managed to do was to bake cookies and open one gift (inevitably pajamas) the night before. On this particular Christmas Eve, when I was a young teen, my mother invited me to join her in a last minute store run to pick up stocking stuffers while the rest of my family stayed home doing their own preparations.
It was a cheerful trip and the anticipation of Christmas felt good. Children seem to love their parents just a bit more at Christmas. It’s when they remember how magnanimous they can be. My mother and I were singing along to tunes on the car radio when we rounded the corner to our street. A plume of smoke interrupted our song as we wondered out loud if someone was still burning leaves this late in the season. We came around the bend and saw the Christmas red fire trucks with swirling lights. Our eyes widened and our necks craned as we tried to puzzle out exactly which house they were at.
A second later my mother realized it was our home, before I did. I know this, because she literally jumped out of the running car toward the cacophony of fire trucks. I reached for the emergency brake and set the flashers on. I thought in that moment I was the one with more presence of mind than my mother. Later, when I became a mother, I understood.
Smoke was billowing from my bedroom window. As I rushed toward the crowd of gathering people I saw the one sight I was looking for. Our perennially jolly friend saw my mother coming and extricated herself away from the crowd toward my mother, who by now was already sobbing. With arms open to my mother she cried out, “It’s ok! It’s ok. Everybody is ok.”
We all stood there on the lawn, watching firemen go in and out of the house. As the crowd thinned, when life was no longer in peril, we still stood in the damp and soggy lawn feeling like the wet mattress the firemen had just thrown out the window. Where else would we go, my teen brain was thinking. This was our home, and after all, the tree and presents were still in there.
That Christmas Eve we spent washing soot off the walls. I remember the interruption to our tradition poignantly, precisely because it DID interrupt our tradition. I was the child who suggested we stop washing walls and just make cookies. It was, after all, Christmas Eve. My mother looked at me like I was stark raving mad.
But she is the one who taught me that traditions matter. She is the one who wanted to cut the tree at a nearby farm, the one who always made us take careful turns opening gifts, the one who made banana nut bread every Christmas. Why is the Christmas bread always better? Because it’s served with a side of purpose and belonging.
Traditions anchor us. They tell us who we are. They bond us to one another as we collectively agree, “This thing…this is what WE do.” There is no WE without the rhythm and motion of the things we do. We collect these rhythms from our ancestors and we pass them on to our children. They may seem small and unimportant, only a loaf of bread or a slightly burned cookie.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
But in the words of Gustav Mahler, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Kids, including teens, have a deep need for predictability. You may not realize it, because it is coupled with a need for independence. As a counselor, I see that teens crave their traditions. They may not express it, but they are rattled if their traditions are uprooted by family stress or Covid. It’s a difficult feeling to put into words, but when teens do they say things like, “Nothing is the same,” or “I feel like I’m floating.” When they are thriving in a family rich with connection and tradition you will know, because they’ll say things like, “Can’t we make the cookies even though the house just caught on fire.”
An uninvited fire taught me how much I crave the warm fire of tradition, stoked from one generation to next. You may think your teen wants to spend their entire holiday scrolling TikTok, but trust me, they’ll get off the couch if you make some cookies.
Originally published on Terri’s personal blog, soultended.com