It's Tradition

For many Jews, this is a time of year that is marked with reflection, hope, celebration and, most importantly to me, tradition. Holidays are piled on top of one another right now, and regardless of degree of religious practice, some form of observation usually marks these holidays.

When I was little, my favourite holiday was the festival of Sukkot. It occurs 5 days after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the most solemn of the Jewish year. In contrast, Sukkot is joyous, a celebration of the harvest. My neighbours would erect a Sukkah – a temporary dwelling that you eat your meals in for 7 days, decorate it with gourds and corn, and invite all the neighbourhood children in for tea and cookies. Sukkot was also the only occasion on which – besides weddings and bar mitzvahs – my family would attend Synagogue. It was fun. There was a parade and candy and funny hats, and we would go with my best friend and her family and get to stay up late.

The holiday ‘season’ for us typically begins in September (the Jewish calendar is different, so it might be pushed to October) with Rosh Hashana, the New Year, and 10 days later, Yom Kippur. Observing these holidays, for my family, meant getting together and eating. Food was always more important than prayers, and to my grandfather, the patriarch of my maternal family, prayers did you no good if there was no food. This sentiment could be widely argued by many, but nobody would ‘win’ on the basis of religious education or understanding. My grandfather knew his religion, and human nature, well. And he had known hunger well.

But he was impatient with religion, so we ate. We would take turns gathering at either my mother’s house or my aunt’s. Card tables would be pushed up against dining room tables, and the children (even as we became adults) would be happily annexed there. On Rosh Hashana, apples and honey were passed around the table, to signify the hope for a good, sweet New Year. On Yom Kippur, the plates were passed the moment the sun set, in case any of my family members were actually breaking the fast that should have begun at sundown the previous day. My mother would make a host of items that the children never ate – gifilte fish with chain, chopped liver, green beans – holding out for her chicken soup with matzo balls (always with matzo balls, even if it was months before Passover) and turkey and brisket and roasted potatoes, or my aunt’s traditional Hungarian meatballs and lukchen kugel with raisins and apples. We ate.

And we talked – or, more aptly, my grandfather yelled. About points of family history that somebody had invariably gotten wrong (‘Fanny, it was ‘76 when we went to Vegas with Helen and Lou!’), or what car had performed the most admirably in its day (‘Nothing beat my Buick. You can keep your Cadillac!’), or he would tell us, again, to our delight, the story of how we won the war with my aunt’s hard, hard matzo balls. What war, he never specified, but we put them in the cannons, and the enemy was defeated. He liked my mother’s better. They were soft. The hard v. soft matzo ball debate was a favourite at our table.

And we laughed. And sang. Our holidays were marked with full houses and arguing and noise and a dog barking for leftovers, and not a little bit of chaos. And joy.

And I miss it so, so much.

My grandparents both died the summer I got pregnant. Their death widened a crack in my mother and her sister’s relationship. The crack became a chasm, the chasm, an abyss. My parents’ marriage ended. My dad moved away. The last holiday my family spent together was Rosh Hashana, 2004. I have not seen my aunt or my cousins since the following January. My cousins are both married now, and the elder cousin and his wife have a baby. I have a baby. It is a complicated situation; more complicated than just calling someone up and saying, ‘Let’s end this.’ But probably not.

So our holidays have changed. Last year we gathered at my mum’s apartment; still ate; still talked; still laughed. But it was not the same, of course. From a table of 16, we were down to a table of 6. This year, my mother went to my sister on the West Coast. So, it was just us, and I didn’t know what to do, so I became sad, and did nothing.

I talked about it with Chris, and he tried his best to elevate my spirits. But it is not his family that fell apart (although he was close with them as well and became my rock during that time), and it is not his holiday, really, so his suggestions that we just move on and find our own traditions angered me, initially.

But he is right. It is time for us to cultivate our own traditions, which are borne of our own family. And really, we have already begun to do that. Chris and I have the traditions that we enjoy as a couple, and we have begun to see the root of family traditions take hold as well.

They don’t have to revolve around a specific occasion, or happen annually. Some do, like the way we go whole hog for Halloween, decorating the house and making costumes and buying the ‘good’ candy (read – chocolate bars). Others don’t – the spur of the moment day trips guided only by our desire for a bit of adventure and our trusty backroads map, and barbeques with whoever wants to come over Sunday afternoon and sit on our back porch. And some are things that I hope to become traditions, like bee’s birthday party with lots of friends, and going to our favourite beach when we visit my dad in Florida, and going apple-picking, and eating pizza and watching movies together on the weekend (ok, this tradition will probably end when bee turns 14, but we’ll give it a go anyway).

I guess the moral of the story is that, regardless of how much we want them back, things change. Things go away. And I don’t want bee to miss out because I can’t let go. I want her to be able to look forward to the holidays because they have become a personification of her own crazy family. I want her to know the security and joy and comfort in these things that I did. I want her to know her family by the things that we do together, and to take them and make them into her own, when it is her turn.

And so, my new year’s resolution is this: to ensure that the traditions that I have always held so dear become hers – become ours.
But I’m still not eating the gifilte fish.