Break
With Tradition
“'I love
tradition,' Dalinar said to Kadash. 'I've fought for tradition...But
merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We
can't just assume that because something is old it is right.'”
Brandon
Sanderson (Oathbringer)
I must preface this post
by saying, I am not a traditional person. Don't ask me why, because I
came from a very ordinary place and people, and my family's customs
were well within the camp of traditional. But, it just doesn't matter
to me if we do things as they've always been done. As my grandmother
told me, “You just ain't right, child.”
Yesterday, as part of his
sermon, our pastor told a story about a little child and her mother.
The child is watching her mother preparing a ham for baking. She
first cuts off the hock end of the ham. Seeing this, the child asks,
“Why did you cut off that end of the ham?” Her mother looks
perplexed, and tells her, “I don't know. It is just the way my
mother did it, so that's how I learned to bake a ham.” But the
child persists (as they so often do), so they go to the phone and
call the child's grandmother. “Grandmother, why do you cut off the
end the ham before you cook it?” Her grandmother responds the same
as the child's mother. “Because that's how I learned to do it from
my mother.” Since the great-grandmother is still living, the child
then calls her and asks the same question, why cut the end off the
ham? The great-grandmother seems surprised by the question, and
responds, “Because I didn't have a pan large enough to cook it
otherwise!”
Mark Twain wrote in The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “The less there is to justify a
tradition, the harder it is to get rid of it.” And he was
right. There is something about the holidays that puts us into
robot-mode. We crank out those turkey's and hams—baked, fried,
roasted, grilled—and serve them up with cornbread dressing and
cranberry sauce. Year after year, decade after decade. There is
security in that I suppose, but as Jiddu Krishnamurti said,
“Tradition becomes our security, but when the mind is secure it
is in decay.” It's okay to ditch the big bird and stuff some
portabella mushrooms instead. Sausage, Italian breadcrumbs and
freshly grated Parmesan cheese make a very good stuffing, and
mushrooms go well with some lightly steamed asparagus.
W. Somerset Maugham
wrote, “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.” Cook up
some new traditions this Thanksgiving. Be wild. Be free. And, please,
don't cut the hock off your ham!
In the Spirit,
Jane
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