Tag Archives for Christmas

Tradition

Turkey Rickshaw

 

I am tired of ham.  I am tired of turkey.  They are not bad foods.  They are just worn out.

 

I have eaten, without pause, turkey and ham every Thanksgiving and Christmas for the past 100 years.  And don’t forget the dressing, mashed potatoes, and deviled eggs.  Sure, they’re only sides you might say.  Guilty by association I say.  It wasn’t until lately that I began to ask myself, why?  Why am I eating the exact same bird every single year?  Why do I cook the exact same sides every single time?  I’ll tell you why.  Tradition.

 

But is that all tradition means?  Repeating the same things over and over again.  In that case, I have a tradition of showering and brushing my teeth every day.  I have a tradition of showing up for work every day.  It’s traditional for me to fill my car with gas twice a week.  Ok.  So tradition is not just repetition.  Maybe there is a little nostalgia attached to the process.  And it is a process, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s not just a noun.  It’s more of a verb if you think about it.  Traditions take place.  They’re events.  They consist of actions and remembrances.  They are familial, local, and personal.  Every corner of the globe has them.  They fill the nook and crannies of our existence, whether it’s a couple of tulips placed on a grave or an entire village coming together in the town square to catch things thrown from a window. 

 

And these events usually evoke a certain comfort.  They take childhood memories of laughing, aromatic delights, and full bellies, and weave a strand of culture and comfort that holds strings of families together generation after generation.  Like bedtime stories.  They teach us.  How to make giblet gravy.  That you have family you’ll never talk to the other 364 days of the year, but that you can share the gravy with today.  That your progeny won’t forget the things passed down to you through the years thanks to a simple repetition of events.  A cultural chain of custody.  And preservation of ideas and ethnic heritage isn’t a bad thing, right?

 

Maybe not for the first forty years.  Maybe I’m having a mid-life-culinary crisis.  I have some good memories that go along with end of the year get-togethers.  I also have memories of lying on my side like a bloated and beached whale for a few hours on the couch, praying to the God of Gastronomy to lighten my load as soon as possible, and to please give me at least a thirty second warning prior.  I have memories of enjoying company and memories of wondering why it’s necessary to be nice to people just because it’s a certain day of the year.  I have memories of learning just how mom makes the dressing and memories of the stove blinking an error signal Thanksgiving morning a few scant hours before everyone was supposed to show up to eat.  It’s a mixed bag is all I’m saying.

 

Might there not be another way to celebrate, though?  Would it be so bad to not eat the same thing next year?  What are the consequences of being non-traditional?  I think we know now why we adhere to the robotic cycle every year: comfort.  So why forego comfort and break bad?  How about growth. 

 

Surely there is a way to preserve what mom and dad consider holy while engaging the process in a creative and forward manner.  Preparing lunch or dinner a little differently isn’t going to erase anyone’s childhood.  Maybe it’s because I equate comfort with a lack of progression.  Get too comfortable with your job, for instance, and you might find yourself in a stagnant career twenty years later with no discernible method of increasing your pay, or for that matter developing a skill set that will allow you to raise your quality of life.  Sure, it’s easy to slip into a comfort zone.  Too easy. 

 

That must be what causes me to stare impassively at those dripping juices surrounded with a heavenly crust.  To levy an imperceptible sneer at the beautiful lake of gravy nestled carefully in the middle of the hand-mashed potatoes.  To plate my dressing, which my mother prepared with love (I know this because she hates the smell of boiling chicken, but does it anyway), with a cold indifference. 

 

I know, I know.  But I can’t help it.  And don’t say you haven’t thought about it at least once.  I know you have.  I know someone has taken to their turkey and thought, “Man, I could so go for some BBQ right now.  Or pork chops.  Or maybe even Pad Thai.  Don’t feel guilty.  It’s your natural yearning to move forward and expand your horizons.  Embrace it.  Stop fixing that casserole that never has so much as a divot in it when the meal’s over and flip through that cookbook that’s in your… well, who knows where you put it years ago?  But you can find it if you try.

 

I’ll leave you with a clipped story I heard once upon a time.  There are five monkeys in a cage.  There are some steps in the middle of the cage.  A banana is hung at the top of the stairs one day and when the monkeys try to climb and reach it, they are all sprayed with a hose.  Soon, the monkeys don’t even bother with the banana.  Then, one of the monkeys is replaced by a new monkey.  The new monkey heads for the banana and is immediately pummeled by the others, with no idea why.  No one has been sprayed in some time.  Soon, that monkey gives up on the banana too.  One by one, the monkeys are replaced, each one learning from the others not to try for the banana.  After a while, all the original monkeys are gone and the new monkeys never attempt to take the banana.  Even though they could.  And why don’t they do things differently, even though they could?  Because that’s the way it’s always been done.  Tradition.

 

I’m just saying, I would eat that fucking banana.

 

 

 

The Library of Lost Works

I keep thinking about the fact that a friend of mine’s journals all burned up in a fire.  She had kept them from the time she was 13 or so and then boom, fire and no journals.  All that history.  All those thoughts, epiphanies, the pain and the joy, the excitement, the loneliness, the everything that was her life, recorded over the years and then gone in a day.

 

I think about it every time I write in my journal.  I write for two reasons.  One, to get all this shit out of my head.  I mean, can you imagine if I kept the fact that eating microwave popcorn causes obesity in other universes to myself?  Holding in a groundbreaking theory like this could cause serious mental constipation.  No way.  Sorry you guys have to be my vent, but there you are.  The second reason is for my grandchildren or their progeny.  Haven’t you ever wondered what it was like for your grandfather or great grandfather growing up?  Sure, you get a clipped story every now and then, maybe on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and that story is of course repeated again and again until that small section of their life is carved in mental marble.  But wouldn’t it be nice to know it all?  You know what made you who you are.  And since your caregivers helped carve out the better part of you (or maybe worse part), wouldn’t you like to know what parental carving tool was used on them?  And so on and so on?

 

So my fear is that I am going to spill my life onto the pages of all my journals over a ten or twenty year period and then have it vanish in a night.  I wonder how many people have lost things this way.  Maybe somewhere there is a Library of Lost Works.  It’s probably just down the street from the Library of Works Never Produced.

 

For instance, I’m certain no one has ever painted a picture of a prairie dog shooting Einstein with a shotgun, in watercolor.  This would be in that library.  Maybe a book called 1,999,999 Ways to Snort Gluons Through a Garden Hose.  That would definitely be in there.  What about an ice sculpture of a campfire?  A concerto in K minor?  A car that runs on irritating bullshit.  You could feed it a constant stream of car commercials on the radio, or maybe hook it up to a politician’s mouth around election time.

 

Of course, the minute they popped into existence in the Library of Works Never Produced, they would, by definition, be forced to pop out of existence there and pop into existence in the Library of Lost Works.  This would make it very difficult to check out a book in the Library of Works Never Produced.  You would have to be very quick.

 

And if you actually wrote a book detailing 1,999,999 Ways to Snort Gluons Through a Garden Hose, for a brief moment, the book would exist in both the Library of Works Never Produced and on your rather filthy computer desk.  One should be very careful at this exact moment to not suddenly destroy the book or it would be in 3 places at once, causing a literary paradox.  It would exist, be lost, and never have existed, all at the same moment.

 

What were we talking about?