Carman: With the holiday season of this wild norm-busting year bearing down on us, are any traditions worth saving? - The Colorado Sun

I grew up in a big, loud family that had rigid — if not entirely sacred — traditions around the holiday season. They involved cocktails, bridge games, a rotating cast of relatives and too much food.

My grandmother would fix her signature salad of cabbage and chopped salted peanuts. My mom roasted a giant turkey that always was at risk of exploding because it was overloaded with Pepperidge Farm stuffing. And my cousin, Doug, who in the era of Polaroids and Instamatics, had a fancy SLR, would take pictures of the mayhem, trying to explain aperture settings and shutter speeds to his unsophisticated, oblivious cousins.

But in the past few years, any attempt to keep the fires of tradition burning has been snuffed out.

We had the year when we had to rush our daughter’s dog, Larry, to the emergency vet on Thanksgiving morning. We were caring for him since his people were out of town and spent much of the day on the phone, negotiating treatment options to keep him alive until they could return to say goodbye. We had turkey for lunch that afternoon at the care center where my mother-in-law was recovering from a broken hip.

Then as if that all wasn’t traumatic enough, the next day my mother-in-law died.

That was followed by the COVID year when we got the family together to walk around City Park in hats and mittens, and then all went home to watch TV alone. The gathering was actually a lot of fun and kept us all safe, but nobody suggested that chilly walk-about become a new tradition.

There was the year we had to cancel a holiday trip because we got COVID. Did we even eat? I don’t remember.

In between we’ve been guests at some lovely holiday gatherings and have eaten many turkey dinners and plenty of pumpkin pies. I’ve come to appreciate other families’ beautiful traditions, though nothing quite compares with having to dig a car out of a snowbank, which for inexplicable reasons (OK, cocktails may have played a part) seemed to happen every year at our home in Wisconsin.

With Halloween behind us, the holiday juggernaut is already in full swing and this year, if all goes as planned, we’ll have critical mass at the Thanksgiving table at a house in the mountains for the first time in a long while. The pressure is on.

But beyond the turkey, I’m wondering at this point if there are any traditions left.

My kids long ago nixed Grandma’s peanut salad and my mom’s scalloped oysters; bridge games have disappeared; Doug grew up and to no one’s surprise won a Nobel Prize in economics, leaving photography to all of us cretins in the smart phone universe; and even the cocktail culture has faded as health concerns about alcohol consumption have grown.

So, it’s time to launch something new.

I’ll propose we watch my favorite holiday movie, “Pieces of April,” to remind ourselves that every family is tragic and crazy in its own way.

We’ll organize a Rummikub tournament, since that appears to be the family’s big thing right now. Winner gets an extra piece of pie.

We’ll roast a turkey and argue about the wisdom of having sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes in a calorie-obsessed universe, or the need for a green vegetable (absolutely!) and whether the cranberries should be sauced, relished or jellied. Heck, it’s my kitchen. I’ll decide.

We’ll take dinner to our neighbor who has fallen on hard times. When you’re already cooking too much food, that seems like a no-brainer.

We’ll bundle up and take our fishing-fanatic guests to a stream to float some flies. (Fingers crossed that it’s not frozen.)

And we’ll toast to being together, knowing that good times are to be cherished because if there’s anything we’ve learned from the past few years, it’s that there are no guarantees.

A little change will do us good. It’s not 1965, after all. But there is one thing we could relive from the glory days of my childhood.

We have a new driver in the family, so if we’re lucky and have enough snow, we could end up digging a car out of the ditch at the end of the steep driveway.

It’s a great way to work off dinner and, well, some traditions are just too important to let die.

Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.

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Diane has been a contributor to the Colorado Sun since 2019. She has been a reporter, editor and columnist at the Denver Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Oregonian, the Oregon Journal and the Wisconsin State Journal. She was born in Kansas,... More by Diane Carman