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Let me ask you a question. Why do you do things the way you do? I mean this in terms of life generally, but a bit more so in terms of this time of year. We’re heading into Winter in the northern hemisphere, and probably also into winter-traditions in seasonally opposite parts of the globe. We’ve just come through Harvest Festival, Samhain, Halloween, The Day of the Dead, All Saints,
All Souls, Remembrance Day, into Diwali and are heading towards Thanksgiving and Hannukah and Yule and Christmas and New Year(s).
What do you celebrate? How? Why?
More importantly: how much awareness to you bring to that what, and how, and why?
Do you still do the things you’ve always done? Do you now do it differently? If you’re holding to old ways, are they rituals? Traditions? Or merely habits?
I’m not asking anyone to change what they celebrate or how…not least because I’ve recently come across some truly beautiful and very personal things that people do. However, I do think it does us good to occasionally look at the why, and whether the why still matters.
Because if it doesn’t, then we can think about doing something else…or imbuing the same with a different meaning. Quite often we do what we do because we’ve always done it that way. And sometimes, I’ll admit, that’s a good enough reason.
If doing a certain thing at a certain time, or eating a certain food cooked a certain way, or watching the same old movie, or playing the same song, taking the same walk, whatever…if doing that connects you to your ancestors, to your soul purpose, to your true self and essential nature…then
please, please, please, keep doing it.
Don’t change a thing. Hug that connection to your centre. Smile into it. Weep into it. Shout it out or sit in silence with it.
The things that have meaning for us, are meant to be carried forward, be that in joy or in pain, in hope or in remembrance, or in some manic mix of all the emotions we ever felt. Do not let go of it if it still matters.
And there it is…the word on the sent-back shield from the Spartans. If.
Ritual matters. Tradition matters. Habits not so much.
With many things there comes a point where what should be, or started out as, a ritual has become merely habit. We do it because that’s the way it is, but the why of it has become lost. Or perhaps it has served its purpose and outlived its place. I’ve discovered that some rituals have a shelf-life. They are there to help us manage a change, or a loss, and then we can gracefully let them go and move into our next chapter, doing things differently.
That’s where I am.
To be fair I’ve been moving into this next chapter for nigh-on six years and, if I’m honest, precious little of it has been graceful. Never mind. Clunky also works.
Now, I am beginning to break with traditions. My own traditions. My own rituals. The ones I inherited and the ones I set up, deliberately or subconsciously, to manage my own changes and losses. The ones that connected me to my ancestors and my past lives, at a time when I feared becoming unanchored, adrift, without that connection, at a time before I found other ways to honour those people and to haul up my anchor. The ones I carried forward from that former life, I eventually realised were tying me to it. Anchors are there to keep you safe, not to keep you static.
If I’m making this sound like something earth-shattering and life-changing, it isn’t – except to the extent that it is. It isn’t earth-shattering at all. I am not talking about abandoning entire belief systems. I am talking about the small things. I think the life-changing part of it is the simplifying, the freeing, the more mindful way of doing what I do.
It takes a few more of the “shoulds” off the shoulders. Any ritual or tradition that we do not, in the very moment of it, find meaningful in some way is nothing more than a ‘should’. I am done should-ing on myself.
I am breaking with old traditions, not necessarily to replace them with new ones – although, who knows? That might happen. I am doing it simply to try out other ways, alternative choices, what ifs.
I recently had a birthday. We had a thing in our family that all cards were to be saved to be opened “on the day”. When we were children, in the run-up to a birthday, Mam & Dad would swoop in when the post arrived and hide any early cards in order to drop them back onto the mat on our actual birthday – and on that day they would leave the birthday child to be first to pick up the post. I have carried that through all the decades, accepting cards with thanks when handed to me or arriving on the doormat, but not opening them until my actual birthday.
This year, I abandoned that. I decided to open each card as it arrived. Early or late or bang on time. I was working on the principle that I could enjoy the ones that arrived early for longer, and because I wasn’t dealing with them en masse (don’t let that fool you into thinking I get hundreds of cards, I don’t) but opening only one or two at a time, with each card I would spend more time with the message it conveyed, the picture, the words, the thought that had gone into it. It also meant that I was not disappointed that some of them arrived late, because that was simply another way of extending the joy of receiving. Stretching out the love, leaning more fully into it.
It strikes me that what I have done here is to delete a ritual, in favour of something else. Taking things as they come falls into a different category that I have no name for. But in this case, I have loved the result. I will no longer save up things to open later. I will enjoy my gifts as they come to me.
I'm not saying this is any better than the former way - only that I found - for now - this way gives me more pleasure.
As we head into December, people have started asking me what I’m doing for Christmas.
I’m not.
Except, you could say, that I sort of am. It used to be a big thing in our family, but these days I don’t do Christmas. I held to it as long as I could, but my major life-shift gave me the freedom to think about what I believe, what I hold true, and what I want from my mid-Winter celebration. In some ways, that is still a work-in-progress - because when people ask me what I'm doing for Christmas, I'm still not comfortable saying, simply, I'm not. Everyone that asks the question has already pre-judged the answer - note they ask 'what' I'm doing, not 'if' I do anything. And my answer makes them uncomfortable.
So this year is a continuation of that work. This year's break is with my tradition of caring whether my response makes you uncomfortable.
A shifting of belief, a coming closer to my own world view, means that now I celebrate the Winter Solstice, the older, seasonal festival, not the newer religious one. I guess that from the outside you might not notice the difference. There will be a tree and fairy lights and holly. There will be what passes for prayer. There will be intention-setting for the year ahead. There will be feasting. Only these things will be done differently, more purposefully than I suspect happens for most in this consumerist world, and on different days.
I will be repeating something I was taught last year, the notion of a last-light walk, followed by a first-light walk. The family whose tradition I have borrowed this from, do it at New Year: last light on New Year's Eve, first light on New Year's Day. I have brought it forward to a time when it will mean more to me. They do it from home. Last year, I also did it from home. This year, I have booked myself into a hotel so that I can do it at the beach.
And I am so looking forward to that quiet celebration of the turning of the year…even though the weather could be dreadful, even though I haven’t checked out the tide times. I am excited by the unpredictability of it. I’m learning that ritual is designed to give us the comfort of familiarity and predictability. I’m leaning into the idea that it ain’t necessarily so. I’m learning that while we need that, the ritual, we also need the chance, we need traditions that have the unknown built into them.
Remember when you were kids, old enough to have stopped believing that all the presents came down the chimney, when you started hunting out where your parents had hidden them? If you were anything like us, you stopped doing that the year you found them, because the joy was in the surprise, the not-knowing. We need risk as well as comfort, unexpectedness is also joyful.
For many years I would decorate my tree on my late Mam’s birthday, as a connection to the way we did things back then. It meant a lot to me. Until it didn’t. I remember my Mam in other ways now, and because ‘Christmas’ isn’t a thing for me anymore, that tradition is a broken link anyway. I can let it go. I can decorate the tree when I feel like it. Earlier or later. When I have the time to enjoy doing it.
My yuletide, my mid-Winter celebration can start and end whenever I choose. The Solstice is the pivot point, but the rest of it can stretch or shrink as I see fit. I don't need to plan it.
Some of it, I will spend alone. That is not the deep sadness that the media insist on telling me that it is. I am sick of people telling me that "no-one should be alone on Christmas". I want to yell back: who says?! There are people who may choose to be. There are people who have no choice but to be. Let's face up to the fact that there are probably infinitely more people who won't be but wish they were!
If you are tempted to break with one tradition this year, let it be the one that says you know how other people should spend their December.
My festive period begins on my birthday, which is near the beginning of Winter, and runs up to the Solstice which is mid-Winter...and then I start preparing for the year ahead. There have been and there will be gatherings of friends, social events, visits to family, indulgences, gift-giving, card-making, music, walks, night-skies, candle-lit feasts, movies, poetry readings, nature-connections, and these things do not have to happen on any one particular day. My biggest break with tradition this year is that, finally, I will stop listening to everyone who even hints that they should.
Go gently into the winter. Be festive or resting as and when you feel the need.
