De-stressing Traditions (And Why They Matter)

A few years ago I found some gingerbread houses on sale at Target and we put them together. My oldest son kept eating the weird candy dots in the box instead of decorating and the cookie itself was not at all delicious at all. Who wants to eat cookies everyone has touched anyway? We didn’t ever finish, and eventually, I threw the whole thing away. The eco-minimalist in me cringed that we were destroying the environment and wasting food. My son loved it. The next year it was ALDI I think. Same story. Grubby fingers, gross candy. Short-lived and not delicious. Then in 2020, I didn’t go into stores, and so I didn’t have a kit. I started scrummaging for how to make the gingerbread houses. As I stared into my pantry under the spell of Great British Bakeoff, gingerbread recipe pulled up on my phone, trying to decide if it was worth it… I spotted my kids’ favorite snack. Graham crackers. And it dawned on me that I’d been making the whole thing far more complicated than it really had to be. Of course, I did what any modern adult would do. I googled it. Friends, I found this video, and the deal was done. We even used leftover Halloween candy and pretzels we had in the house to decorate. (Check this construction tip out if you plan on having graham cracker architecture competitions) Then everyone ate their house for breakfast the next day and a new tradition was born, like a phoenix out of the ash of 2020. We did the whole thing again on repeat for the rest of the season. It’s a silly story, but creating traditions can sometimes start out that way, can’t it? A little messy, a little thrown together, but a whole lotta fun. In fact, the importance of a tradition lies in the shared meaning and value we give it. We’ve got a great podcast lineup this fall, full of traditions that are fun for teens, too. But why do traditions matter? Why are we drawn to the idea of traditions? What do we gain from them and how can we maximize the be