Musings
~ by Mark Blackwell Season of Traditions
“ Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.”— Unknown
We’ re coming into that time of the year where we surrender a fair amount of“ free will” to“ tradition.” Thanksgiving is coming up and we hardly get the last piece of pumpkin pie finished before the Christmas shopping days countdown begins. Undergirding the whole season of festivities is“ tradition.” But what is tradition? Pretty much it is“ the way we’ ve always done it.” Family is where we receive our first lessons in tradition. Most of us are taught the correct way that the silverware goes in the drawer; knives first, then forks, then soup spoons( or the reverse). There is an order that was handed down from one of your grandmas, and probably great or even great-great grandmas— unless you grew up in an anarchist household where you just threw everything in with total abandon.
The big, widely shared traditions generally start taking over our lives around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving is primarily a food and family holiday, whereas Christmas comes with a whole trainload of baggage.
Our American Thanksgiving is a secular holiday that can be traced back to 1621 when a group of English refugees were saved by the indigenous folks that discovered them. According to what many of us learned in school, certain natives
of Massachusetts taught the Pilgrims how to plant and grow corn, squash, and beans. When harvest time came around the Pilgrims decided to have a celebration to thank the Lord for their good fortune.
They invited members of the local native tribe to a feast that lasted three days. We assume that they had corn, beans, and squash along with fish and wild game. In modern times we commemorate this feast by cooking up some corn, boiling down beans, making pumpkin pie( it is in the squash family), plus roasting a turkey, mashing potatoes, and whipping up some tangy cranberry sauce.
It can be a three-day event, but most folks only get one or maybe two days off from work to celebrate. It takes one day to prepare and cook the feast, one day to gorge on the food, and one day to recover from gluttony.
Christmas on has its roots in religion, but has been co-opted into a full-blown secular holiday in this country.
32 Our Brown County Nov./ Dec. 2022