Our opinions on tradition vary, because we all have our own different traditions and our own life experiences. Whether your traditions include long standing history, or they are something new you have just started, people tend to gravitate towards some sort of familiarity. Why is that? Why do humans love familiarity? We think it is because humans experience a lot of change. 

Experiencing change is hard for a lot of people, some love it, but it is common to struggle when experiencing change. Especially growing up, there is a lot of change you need to go through. Traditions are supposed to be something that always stays the same. However, traditions are going to change and that’s a fact. At some point we will leave our childhood homes, and we will no longer have the same holiday experience we have always had. People go to college, get married, get divorced, have kids, or die and these holidays are forever changed.

The holiday season is not going to be the same forever. Sometimes that might not affect people as much as it would for others, but it really depends on the person. Tradition is all about memories, you could have had a terrible childhood and hate traditions, or an amazing one that you love remembering. Sometimes there is a person in your life that makes a tradition for you, and they may not be in your life forever. In some ways traditions are the thing that stabilizes your life. When everything else is changing, one thing stays the same. We do not always have control of those traditions, so it is important to know how to differentiate whether it is the tradition itself we are missing or the people, memories or familiarity of it. 

What we can do when we can’t control these things is; acknowledge that the sadness of the tradition not happening is usually because of something deeper and is usually not about the tradition itself, simplify your traditions (doesn’t need to be all or nothing) or make new traditions and try to fill the hole of the other. 

If you do not appreciate traditions and are around people that do, you should respect their traditions and hope that they appreciate what you can put into the holiday. Whether you do not like going to church like most of your family, or dislike to participate in games, or any other tradition, people should care that you are there for the parts you can participate in and focus less on the things that are too much for you to handle. 

Whether you participate in traditions or not, people should appreciate the way you are. If the holiday season is looking a bit different this year we hope you can make the most of it and adapt to the changes the best you can instead of focusing on the things you can’t do.