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Health & Fitness

Nontraditional Traditions

Spring holiday and family traditions

I've always viewed myself as looking for 'the next big thing' and avant guard in the arts, but as I get older I have to admit to myself I often like the old ways.  My spouse and I ideally would like a life with the styles and ambience of the 30s with the technology and medicine of today.  (Imagine for a second what an art deco MRI machine would look like or clothes for a senior prom.)  Part of this is embracing and recognizing tradition.

Traditions are an integrated part of early Spring: ice cream stands, opening day, new buds on the trees, perennials surviving another winter and planting annuals risking there will not be a hard freeze.  There are also traditions associated with holidays at this time of year.

Our family recently celebrated Passover, with three generations.  Passover, unlike other religious holidays, is celebrated at home and commemorates the biblical story of the redemption of slaves from Egypt. The Last Supper is an instance of Passover and explains why Holy Week often coincides with Passover.

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Part of the Passover celebration involves symbolic artifacts, including a special plate with small bowls called a seder plate and a cover for the unleavened bread, matzoh.  This Passover was imbued with objects from multiple generations.  The seder plate is from our generation to the generations of my daughters and grandchildren. The cover supposedly is from three generations ago in Europe.  The main wine cup is a gift to my daughter from a long time ago. The meal was eaten on China and silverware from my deceased in-laws and now in possession of the next generation.  A new artifact was started for the grandchildren, a ten plague box (part of the Passover story is God inflicts ten plagues on the Egyptians until they free the slaves) consisting of plastic novelties like fake blood and plastic locust, made, of course in our contemporary world, in China.

This is tradition type tradition, shared by many, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter dinners.

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But there is also intergeneration rite of passage tradition, such as experienced by three generations of women in my family: going to see Annie.  Just as my wife took my daughter when she was young (deliberate ambiguity here), my wife and daughter took my granddaughter to see Annie.  The fascination of Annie to post toddler and prepubescent girls is beyond the comprehension of males.  My granddaughter reacted like my daughter to seeing Annie.  Another generation singing loud and off key to 'The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow'.  At the same time, my son-in-law and I took the boys, my two grandsons to see some full length feature cartoon; I dozed off for the first half but you could have performed surgery without anesthesia on the boys as they were totally engrossed in the movie.  This will be another tradition, taking the boys to the movie.  And in the same vein, I expect the first person I will see the forthcoming Star Wars movie in 2015 or 2016 will be with my daughter as this is a tradition from the previous six starting when she was about five.

The best part of tradition, especially family traditions, is how it lives on. Stories get embellished and divorced from actual events but that misses the point - the story is still there and those not physically here still are here.

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