Traditioooooooooooon

All good traditions start somewhere, right? Like in Grade 9, my friend and I decided to declare May 26 International Bad Religion Appreciation Day (IBRAD) and celebrated by listening to Bad Religion songs on a Walkman over lunch hour. By the following year she had switched schools, so we celebrated by me calling to wish her a happy birthday and saying "hey, remember IBRAD?"

And that was the end of that.

Sometimes I feel like I could justify taking a day off work every May 26 saying I have a really important tradition that I need to keep up. It seems like you can call just about anything a tradition and people will buy it. Not only buy it, sometimes they'll even spend a lot of money on it.

Take "stagettes." A party where a bride-to-be celebrates her last night of freedom (from the person she is ostensibly in love with), by renting a party bus and wearing a penis necklace. Night club owners and bus rental companies have tried to convince my friends that that's a tradition. I'm not sure if you could call it a "family tradition" in my case as neither of my grandmothers, nor my mother, nor my aunts got their own penis necklace, but things have to start somewhere right?

Christmas is another one. Started out as a religious holiday. Very definite religious holiday. Christian celebration of Jesus Christ's birthday. No question, religious.

But, over the past few decades in Canada, Christmas has morphed into a secular celebration that non-Christians are invited to participate in. It's sort of associated with the winter solstice, sort of an excuse to shop and get angry at anyone who doesn't get in the "festive spirit." Presents, lights, tinsel, candy canes have nothing to do with religion, yet people are religiously passionate about it and try to insist that atheists/Hindus/Jews are ruining the fun by saying "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas."

I'm kind of annoyed by "traditions" that are actually only specific to a very small group of people, who try to make their definitions of "traditional" the norm for everyone around them, and then get annoyed when you don't buy in. "Traditional Sunday lunch." Well, we used to have chicken noodle soup picnics on Sundays when I was little. Is that traditional for everyone? If you mean roast beef and potatoes, who is that really traditional for? Rich non-vegetarians from 1970s England? Traditional snacks. Traditional families. Traditional ways to get a job. How many of these are truly time-honoured, widely accepted traditions?