Over the holidays, I had time to reflect on our family’s traditions and how they’ve grown and morphed over the years.
Impending life changes in our family hit me with the realization that more alterations to those customs are forthcoming. Through a special gift from my husband, though, I was reminded that while our traditions may change, their legacy and the core of what we celebrate and focus on will remain resolute.
A Look Back
As still-new members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS), I frequently give thanks for our church home and chuckle at the road that led us here.
One of the many ways I can look back over my life and see God’s hand leading and preparing us for where we are now, spiritually speaking, is how drawn I’ve always been to embracing the church calendar and its God-focused traditions.
I grew up in a reformed Presbyterian home where my minister father kept those traditions, including Christmas, at arms’ length. Granted, he obliged the whims of each church where he served to some extent. He refused to participate in some of the activities, though he didn’t always fight a congregation on their traditional events.
What this looked like from my perspective was that we enjoyed the annual Christmas Eve candlelight service, which I believe my parents may have written and fine-tuned over the years.
It also meant that I was forbidden to participate in activities of pagan origins—like the Hanging of the Greens service where I was to have my first solo. And, in the case of the church that insisted on including the jolly fat man during a family event, I found myself horrified at being pulled up to sit on the lap of a man I had been raised to consider a terrible twisting and perverting of a Christian celebration of the infant birth of Christ.
On the home front, I reached a point where I hated Christmas because my father angrily railed against pretty much every aspect of the season around us, both inside and outside the church.
I recall a vague awareness of something called Advent and of Advent candles and calendars. I wasn’t sure what all that was about, but I loved the idea of the candles, especially.
At an early age, I insisted on keeping the wise men far from the nativity and slowly leading them toward the Christ child since that was more accurate. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that Epiphany—recognized on January 6—has a deeper meaning, one that should be especially precious to every non-Jewish believer in God and our Messiah Jesus Christ.
At some point during my childhood, I recall visiting another church that was more “high church” and followed those church calendar traditions I’d been taught were unnecessary and, perhaps, “Catholic.” It was Holy Week, and I believe we may have been there on Maundy Thursday. Regardless of the exact day, I remember they had special services each day of the week. The minister’s robes were specific colors, and there were reasons behind them. The pulpit was adorned in matching colors, and everything meant something. I was captivated and felt a sense of awe I had never experienced before, and I longed to attend a church where such traditions were kept and explained.
After college, I chose to join a Southern Baptist church. At the time, my now-husband and I were talking about marriage, and he was in seminary to become a Baptist pastor. I knew I wasn’t Baptist, but I also knew that my soon-to-be husband and I had most understandings of the Bible in common, including some uncommon in Baptist circles. I pressed forward with the unnecessary dunking on my own so I would be acceptable to any future church-goers we may encounter once he graduated.
Fast-forward, Tony did graduate, but he chose not to become a pastor. We continued in non-denominational and Baptist churches where he frequently taught and preached and I also taught children and women from time to time.
Our marriage and then parenthood began a new era of holiday traditions. While a couple of the churches we were part of included the Advent candles during the weeks leading up to Christmas, they still seemed to be missing important celebrations and focused remembrances that I began reading more about as I studied the early church. I longed for solemn services to commemorate the most important moments in Christianity. I brought our own version of Advent into the house when the kids were still young.
As the years went by, and I began to research and ask questions about Kings Day that kicks off king cake and carnival season in our part of the world—southeast Louisiana—I became more adamant about slowly moving the wise men toward Christ until January 6 when we give thanks that the Messiah came for the whole world, not just to one people group.
And now, God has brought us to a church where we actively and solemnly and joyfully celebrate each of these moments in the church calendar together with our church family. I’m still learning the history and the focus of each as I gladly shed the half-hearted celebrations I’ve known in the past and polish and improve the mash-up of traditions I had attempted to piece together on my own.
We attend special services throughout the Advent and Lenten seasons, and I’m learning the colors associated with each day or season of the year and what those colors remind us of and help us focus on. We celebrate each major moment of Christianity’s history and look forward with eagerness to the culmination when Christ will return. We also give thanks for those who have gone before us, including those saints we read about in history and those from our own families and friends who have preceded us into heaven, without worshipping or praying to them.
Aside from the religious traditions we’ve embraced over the years, we’ve also added things like Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic tradition of gifting books for Christmas and opening and reading them on Christmas Eve. It went perfectly with the tradition I’d had since childhood of choosing one gift to open on Christmas Eve. And, of course, we already gifted books to the kids and one another. As each year’s activities shift and change with the plans of extended family and the ever-changing work schedule of my husband, we sometimes celebrate our literary routines on Christmas Eve Eve instead.
A number of years ago, we added the reading of Socks for Christmas by Andy Andrews. His childhood recollections remind us to think of others and be mindful of the needs around us while not getting caught up in selfish greediness. We exchange socks, and I always tear up as our son reads the part about the siblings who received shoes for Christmas but no socks.
Sometimes my daughter and I bake together. When we do, we typically take little packages of sweets to our neighbors. If we don’t have time, though, we don’t force it. I learned that the hard way. Just because it’s something we enjoy doing and we want it to be a tradition we never let slide doesn’t mean it always happens. Instead, we may have a new opportunity together, like filling out the FAFSA or getting a nose pierced or taking my son shopping for clothes because he’s never asked to do such a thing before.
Sometimes I reread A Christmas Carol. Sometimes we read historical accounts of St. Nicolaus. Sometimes we participate in our library’s winter reading challenge, and sometimes I host a Family Reading Challenge.
A Realization
As much as traditions are meant to be a “customary pattern,” as Merriam Webster tells us, they are more about the heart of their meaning than about the action itself. As I looked back over the years, I realized how much our traditions have morphed and shifted and how, often, what we consider a tradition is something we’ve only done once or twice over the years, though it’s stuck with us because of the memories made and the company shared.
And so, as every year changes in some small or large way, I have come to realize it’s the heart and soul of what’s most important that we will cling to, whether the outside actions of it look the same as the Christmas before or not.
At the core of our family traditions are three things: faith in Christ and a focus on the incredible gifts God has given us, intentional time together as the family God has brought together and an awareness of and a choosing to embrace opportunities with friends and to help those around us.
A Crossroads
I think the reflection on how our traditions have morphed over the years hit deeper this year as I realized I have no idea how next year will look for our family.
With the flip-forward of a year’s worth of calendar pages, our daughter will be completing her first semester in college and both children should be driving and planning their futures.
Will they be dating at that point? Will we be adapting to other families’ traditions? Which of the things we did this year will we no longer have time to include?
I had a moment of worry and sadness as I realized one year from now may be unrecognizable, but then I thought back to how different our traditions have actually been from year to year.
Recognizing that it was the outer actions, though, that are what have changed rather than the inner motivations calmed the turmoil in my mother’s heart and made me hopeful for the years to come with however our traditions adapt.
That calming of spirit really came thanks to a gift from my husband that was appropriate and beautiful at first glance but that became perhaps the most purposeful and thoughtful gift I’ve ever received.
Where a Legacy Leads
Tony gifted me two books this year: An Encyclopedia of Tolkien: The History and Mythology that Inspired Tolkien’s World by David Day and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, illustrated by Jemima Catlin.
Both are gorgeous books with fine covers and exquisite designs inside and out. Receiving them as gifts was, as I said, beautiful in themselves. Tony knows how much I admire Tolkien and how much his writing has inspired and taught and molded me and my writing.
But then, as the kids were chatting about the books they’d opened and were trying on their new socks, Tony and I had a quiet moment together where he explained why he sought out an illustrated version of The Hobbit for me.
Several weeks previously, he and I—in one of our rare but treasured times of uninterrupted and deeper conversation—had brought up the topic of becoming grandparents in the not-so-distant future.
Now, I should interject that neither of our children are currently in relationships, and as seventeen- and fifteen-year-olds should not be gifting us grandchildren for a while yet. That being said, Tony and I have lately been feeling the closeness to that stage.
Our conversation centered around how I realized I would be able to welcome that stage once it arrived. It no longer feels distant and weird and like something I want nothing to do with. Instead, I can picture new family members and memories and understand the new type of joy that stage of life will bring.
And so, Tony told me in our whispered conversation alongside the bustle of our kids’ Christmas experiences that our conversation had stuck with him and that he wanted to find an illustrated copy of The Hobbit so that I could read the book to our grandkids one day and continue the legacy of a love for reading that I’d shared with him and our children.
Reader, I teared up.
I believe both of us envisioned those future children snuggled up on either side of me with this olive green book open on my lap as I read the words that, alongside the captivating illustrations, will ignite another generation of imaginations.
Traditions are about legacy. They are what we pass along and what we had passed to us.
The legacy of words and stories upholds the focus of our family’s traditions and the legacies of faith, family, friends and others that they contain.
Now I know the traditions we’ve tweaked and adapted and embraced over the years will continue in differing forms, unchanged in their underlying legacy.
What traditions have you held over the years? How have they changed? What is the underlying legacy of your traditions?