Here's to the American Tradition

I was today years old when I realized high school football games were covered on television. I’m from a small town in Louisiana where the news includes gator sightings and fishing rodeos and local community music festivals, so I guess I grew up paying more attention to those things than any coverage of kids playing sports, but here in Texas, football seems unavoidable. Football is tradition in Texas, so I’m told. Like BBQ, livestock shows and the light sprinkling of voter suppression. It’s all tradition.

As we approach the holidays, I’ve been thinking a lot about tradition. Why do we eat turkey on Thanksgiving? Why do we go around the table and say what we’re thankful for? What would happen if we decided to eat Sichuan takeout and have a karaoke dance party in the living room instead?

For many of us, 2020 was the first time we were forced to evaluate our traditions. Drive-by birthday parties, Zoom graduations and live-streamed weddings graced our social feeds to remind us all year long that what worked for us for decades wasn’t going to work during a pandemic. For me, Thanksgiving last year was the biggest shift. Instead of watching the election coverage the first week of November, my very politically-split family escaped to the hill country, made thanksgiving dinner together and intentionally reminded ourselves that we were still us—no matter the outcome. On the actual Thanksgiving day, my husband and I spent the evening cooking spicy Indian food alone in our home because we were both infected with COVID and desperately needed to taste something.

Since the giant collective shaking of our gathering etch-a-sketch that was 2020, we’ve all likely fallen into 2 categories: either you’re itching for things to go back to “normal,” or maybe you’re dreaming up ways to reinvent your traditions again, more intentionally this time, now that the can of proverbial worms is open.

As nostalgic as my millennial soul is, I’ll admit I’m part of the latter group. I’m doing a lot of daydreaming these days around why American culture clings so tightly to our traditions. We’re not only a young country that was founded on ideals of rebellion and rethinking the status quo, but we’re also a uniquely diverse and multicultural society. But for all the lip service we pay to our grand melting pot, we don’t do a great job of making space for anyone who doesn’t follow the mainstream traditions. Any outsider looking at American culture would take one walk into a grocery store and tell us we aren’t very rebellious at all. From the floor-to-ceiling stacks of canned cranberry sauce and pumpkin filling in November, to the tortilla chips and wing sauce in February, to the booze—so much booze—at the end of the year, it’s pretty clear that the majority of consumers in cities and towns across the US are following a set of explicit instructions for what to do, what to eat and what to argue over throughout the year. Even 2020 couldn’t rattle our tradition cages that much. There are economic theories about how in-person birthday parties were the hidden super-spreader events of the pandemic. And even though most of us couldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving the way we’d planned, 86% of us still ate turkey—we just switched to smaller turkeys, leaving hundreds of farmers with turkeys too big to sell.

If you’re digging your heels in and determined to have a traditional Thanksgiving this year, I invite you to do 15 minutes of research on the subject. Thanksgiving back in early American history was more about violent misunderstandings than about togetherness. Yet we keep on pretending, year over year, like our ancestors had some sort of happy gathering in the name of gratitude with people they accidentally discovered and then subsequently massacred, diseased and uprooted for years to come. And we still think that working for 8 hours in the kitchen on a big turkey is going to magically transform our embattled, exhausted, angry souls into sweet, open-hearted joyful beings. Instead, the best we really get is lulled into sleep by tryptophan, a sugar crash and the ambient sounds of a football game on a distant living room TV.

We cling to our traditions like they’re going to keep our society from crumbling even though some of them we’re starting to outgrow and some of them stem from systems designed to crumble certain communities of people.

Maybe your traditions are working well for you and your family. If that’s true for you, I wish you all the nostalgic, traditional happiness-togetherness-peaceful-light-warm-fuzzy feelings in the world. And if your traditions are deeply rooted in meaning, ancestral wisdom, survival of your culture, sacred beliefs or something else important and near to your heart, keep them. But if your traditions seem a little outdated, a little off or even a little cruel, it’s okay to rethink them. It’s okay to invent new ones too. And it’s even better if you can make space for those people in your lives with their own perspectives and traditions, honor the truth about the origins of our holidays, and allow for the cultural nuance and variety that can make us a true, beautiful melting pot.