Hacking tradition
The complicated beauty of holiday celebrations.
In my home, fall brings birthday cake and bread shaped like dragons. The cake is a Blitzen Cake for my dad, made with his mother’s recipe and it is always spectacular: double layered meringue and sponge with a gorgeous custard filling. Sometimes, I put coconut on top, sometimes toasted almonds. This year, I had an extra egg white, so the meringue was taller than usual and towered generously. It’s been five years since my dad died, but I’m still baking a cake for him every year.
The bread is for my husband to celebrate Michaelmas. I make an enriched dough, then braid and twist it into a serpentine curve, with rugged scissor-snipped scales and cruel currant eyes. We slice it into pieces to toast and eat with lashings of butter. A delicious way to conquer our fears at the beginning of a new school year. Every year it turns out a little bit differently, and each year’s dragon has his own character. Traditions return with the seasons, but every year is different.
Inauthentic tradition
Traditions give us a road map for the coming season. From Thanksgiving through Remembrance Day and on into Advent and the days of Christmas, our traditions are markers of time and our place within it. In our traditions, our stories are retold each year. We return to our roots and remember who we are. We hold onto recipes. We bring out the old candlesticks. We iron the cloth and set the table. We count the days.
But we can’t get traditions right because that isn’t how they work. They might be meaningful and memory-laden, but I don’t think anyone can ever say that traditions are authentic. Any tradition is only ever this year’s performance of the remembered past. This year’s Christmas cake is never going to be your mother’s Christmas cake, but that doesn’t matter because someday, your grown child will remember this one, decipher your recipe and try to make it again.
Fit for purpose
When I heard that the theme for this issue was hacking, my first thought was about a certain Swedish furniture store. Then I started wondering about how that speaks to our lives of faith.
What new ways can we imagine for old things?
I think the process at work is more complicated and more beautiful than coming up with new ways to use shelving. We can – and do – hack tradition, making both deliberate and accidental changes as we reach back into our past for old wisdom. But we are also hacked by tradition. We are changed as we encounter and re-discover old patterns anew at different stages of our lives. Thanksgiving’s grateful prayers change as we age and our roles in our communities shift.
Christmas changes as we watch our children grow and see how servant love emerges in new and challenging ways. As we follow where Christ calls, we are changed and nourished. Tradition feeds us, and we find we are students, learning as we go and gathered around the table. Paul reminds us that we are constantly transformed by the renewing of our minds. Hacking and hacked, we see old words in a new light.
Besides such obvious traditional ‘times’ like birthdays and Christmas and Easter, I used to look forward to the first day of trout fishing, and the first day of ‘hunting season’ (small game). There were unstated but pretty consistent ways of preparing for each. Maybe most important was the Last Day of School, which in our enlightened times, was usually about May 28: there was clean-up a soft-ball game, sliding a card or present onto the teachers’ desk and the doxology: “School’s school’s out/ teacher let the fools out. . . . ”
On another level, in our small town, church bells would ring on Saturday afternoon at 5:00 p.m., meaning “prepare for the Sabbath” or “prepare for church.”