on tradition

For decades, I’ve decorated my Christmas tree, just as I have again this year, with angels. It’s a tradition. Well, it’s my tradition. My parents never did it and my adult children don’t do it. Just me. As I put up all the other decorations, some from my early years as an adult, a few from my husband’s past, some gained and cherished through the years from family and friends, I began thinking about the idea of tradition in all areas – holidays, family patterns, cultural and national celebrations.

Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift, is an extraordinary treasure I’ve returned to again and again for insight. Subtitled How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, the dedication gets at the heart of tradition. After a simple “For My Parents,” Hyde adds a quotation: “What is good is given back.”

In the purest, highest sense of the word, tradition is giving back. If you’re thinking that it can be cloying and feel oppressive, that is a misunderstanding of tradition, or perhaps the reactive mood of a rough patch or adolescence or some other time-bound condition of the heart or mind. And, I get it. I’ve been there, too. But, consider Hyde’s take. He writes about how cherishing gifts of the imagination contribute toward collectives we call culture and tradition, and how this act – how cherishing gifts of the imagination – is a way that “the dead may inform the living and the living preserve the spiritual treasures of the past. To have the works of the past come alive in the active imagination is what it means ‘to have gathered from the air a live tradition,’ to use Ezra Pound’s wonderful phrase.”

Put another way, when I recreate my mother’s recipe for beef stew, I bring the past into the present, even if I add an ingredient or forget one. Perfection is not the goal; remembrance is. When I hang my late husband’s one Christmas ornament on the tree with my angels, I bring him into the room for the holiday with humor and joy and wistfulness. When I make the same cookies year after year, I create a legacy that my children and grandchildren can recreate long after I’ve moved on.

Tradition isn’t rigid repetition. It’s a creative act of remembering how people lived. It’s honoring what is actually generative and letting go of what is not. It’s leaving your gifts on the threshold of other, younger lives for them to sort through and cherish in some future. Hyde writes, “Bestowed from the dead to the living and from the living to the unborn, our gifts grow invisibly among us to sustain each man and woman above the imperfections of state and age.”

May your gifts and your traditions sustain you above the imperfections of state and age.

© 2025 www.megreilly360.com

12/8/2025