In the household of my childhood, it was bullet buns. That's what had to be made to round out the Christmas scene. Not that the tradition had started on purpose. Some of the most significant and lasting ones don't.
In this case, the tradition arose spontaneously from my sister's attempts at baking, circa 1964. She decided to make something for Christmas morning. Cinnamon buns. But in her eight-year-old hands, they were bullets: small and hard and barely edible.
And so, even now, if we all happen to be together at Christmas – which isn't often, as we're spread out around the world – my father will insist on bullet buns for Christmas morning. The tradition is only slightly spoiled by the fact that my sister can now pull off cinnamon buns that aren't quite as bullet-y. But she has to be the one to make them.
That's the thing about traditions. They're forever attached to the person who started them, intentionally or not. If I were to make those buns, it would be like wearing my sister's lipstick.
But now, that particular tradition, and its invocation, is not about her; not really. It's a trigger for nostalgia we all participate in. "Delicious!" our father would announce about her awful childhood baking. He and my mother had five children, three of us born when they were still in their early 20s. Clearly, the best strategy was to make the responsibility fun. He used the same tone of conviction when floating on his back in frigid lake water, his feet sticking up like little crooked periscopes. "Glorious!" he would call out to us on shore. We didn't all follow his lead, of course. But now, I think of his determined enjoyment as one of the most memorable and endearing things about our family life.
Sure, it's rosy retrospection. All families are made up of a million moments, some happier than others. But traditions are always linked to the good ones, the ones we want to remember. They're a happy drug; demanding – in the moment of playing them out – a willing suspension of disappointment.
As a mother who has spent a couple of decades as an impresario of happiness at holiday time for my own family, I think of traditions in the same way that I anticipate the first snowfall. Very nice, but they're work – a joy and a burden. You are the keeper of them, which means you have to do them, and if you don't? Well, that can feel as bad as missing your kid's concert. But I would never abandon them entirely. Once, I tried to nix the plum pudding.
"You can't do that," one of my children said.
"But you guys don't even like it," I pointed out.
"That doesn't matter," another son explained. He looked at me as though the cat had brought me in.
"You will eat something you don't like?" I teased him, thinking of his anti-fish years. I'm pretty sure I had my hands on my hips.
"It's tradition," he explained as if announcing the presence of the sun in the sky. "Otherwise, it's just not Christmas."
Needless to say, this is not a household that would tolerate Tofurky.
Traditions can be useful as emergency parenting tools – a handy distraction. There have been a few times when a game of charades has defused a tense situation between family members. And, for some years, I have been one of those mothers who insists, through clenched teeth, that even when a teenager is in a foul mood we are going to have a perfectly lovely time trimming that goddamned tree.
But mostly, we hold on to our own family traditions for the same reason, I think. They are a comfort, a return to magic and innocence, when we really did believe in Santa Claus. That's why the tradition of stockings remains in our family. Psychologists will explain what many of us already know – that rituals and traditions are a certainty in an uncertain world. They remind us that some things don't have to change. And they cement our group identity. Each family has a set of traditions as individual as their DNA.
They're also a thread between the living and the dead. Gail Anderson-Dargatz told me recently about the tradition of Advent calendars in her family. For years, her mother would send one to her and her three sisters every year, "like clockwork," by Dec. 1. "It was a way for us to stay connected even when we couldn't all be together," the author of Turtle Valley and A Cure for Death by Lightning, among other novels, explained on the phone from the Shuswap-Thompson area of British Columbia.
In the lead-up to the holidays following her mother's death in the spring of 2007, she was "very aware that I wasn't going to get that Advent calendar." One day close to the first of December, she received a notice for a package held at a rural collection centre. She went and handed the card to the postmistress. It was obvious that the package contained an Advent calendar. "It was spooky," she recalls. And then she realized that the eldest sister had sent it – as she had to her other sisters – without telling any of them. "I burst into tears," Anderson-Dargatz says. "The postal ladies must have wondered what was wrong with me. It was an overwhelming experience." Every year since, her sister has kept up the tradition.
A friend of mine has a similar story. Her mother had a repertoire of holiday baking that was part of the way the family celebrated Christmas. There was shortbread, mincemeat tarts, nuts and bolts, and rum balls. After her mother died in 1996, my friend came across her collection of recipes. For her own family, she would make shortbread. And then one year, she asked her father what he would like for Christmas, and he suggested that it would be nice to have some of her mother's baking. "So I began to send him a care package with everything she used to bake," she explains.
Last year, she scaled back a bit.
"You didn't make the rum balls," her father pointed out in a phone conversation.
"No, I've been too busy."
"Oh," he said.
No one else was going to make them for him – a concoction of crushed vanilla wafers, cocoa powder, icing sugar and rum. His new wife has her own baking traditions. And my friend is his only child.
This year, she made some.
"You made the rum balls," her father commented. There were no thank yous, she says; just the statement.
"Yes, I made the rum balls, Dad," she replied.
Families are a mysterious force. So much is shared in them, sometimes in painful exchanges, but in other instances, never acknowledged. The subtext of family gatherings often says more than the words exchanged. It's ironic that our most fundamental social connection is the one we often can't fully articulate. And maybe that's another reason for traditions.They're a powerfully simple counterpoint to the complexity of family. They both obviate and trigger emotions. They're a continuum from the past into the future; an attempt to ritualize love; to make it endure. And they express our need to reach for a past we can never fully recover or precisely remember.