Honoring Traditions
This post is going to be a little different. This one is not project-based, but rather some reflection on a tradition that my wife and I have had for going on 15 years now, and a tradition that dates back even further in my family.
If you would rather see a DIY project, click here for my most recent one where I made some charcuterie boards using clear acrylic templates.
The tree you see above is naked. It has been stripped of almost all of its decorations, including the tinsel that was put on it at the beginning. Why is that? Don’t most people just throw away the whole tree, including the tinsel? Or do people even us tinsel much any more?
I don’t know if the idea of tinsel is an antiquated thing by itself, and my wife’s family never did put tinsel on their trees. But my family did. Keep reading to hear a bit more about this tradition with tinsel.
I recently talked about this on an episode of my podcast, We Built A Thing. I’ll link it here if you want to check out the episode. We actually all shared some of our traditions that we like during the Christmas season, and we even had some listeners tell us some of their traditions.
HOW DID IT START?
Let’s go back a few decades. My dad grew up incredibly poor in rural northern Alabama. His family was in the habit of saving everything, and when I say everything, I mean everything. His mom would even save old pantyhose and use pieces of them to tie plants up in the garden. (That was actually really smart. You see, something like a rubber band breaks down being in the sun and weather. Pantyhose don’t break down like that, so they remain strong and stretchy.)
Each year, when Christmas was done, they would remove the tinsel from their tree and put it back in the box to be used another year. My dad didn’t really think much of this until he married my mom. They were not well off financially, my dad and mom, but they were soundly in the middle class. They could definitely afford some cheap tinsel (couldn’t have been expensive in the mid-’70s), but they made the decision to still take the time and effort to remove each little strand of tinsel from the tree at the end of the Christmas season and pack it away for the next near.
It was to be a nod to the past and to remember the places from where they came.
HOW LONG HAS THIS CONTINUED?
Fast forward to 2006, the year Rebecca and I got married. I had told this story to Rebecca, and she really liked the idea of it. Again, we were not very well off as two young people with budding careers, but we could definitely afford a box of tinsel for $1 each year. We made the conscious decision to do what the two previous generations before us did. We wanted to honor that memory with carrying on the tradition ourselves.
ISN’T IT A LOT OF WORK?
Well, isn’t it a lot of work to take the tinsel off of the tree each year and put it back in the box in a way that it can be reused? Yes. Yes, it is. But each year, as we are stripping the tree, we think back to family who didn’t always have it as well off as we did. Each year, we remember our beginnings and that we should not take for granted such small things, even as small as tinsel on a Christmas tree.
I like to think it has taught us to look at other small (and large) things in our lives that people around us might take for granted, and ponder them. Even if we just think about them for a moment longer than we otherwise would, it might be just enough for us to gain perspective that we didn’t have already. Or at the very least, continue to remember our blessings and where we as a family came from.
WILL IT CONTINUE? HOW FAR?
We are not sure how far this tradition will continue, but we definitely already talk about this tradition with our 3 kids, ages 10, 8, and 4, and tell them the significance of those thin slivers of shiny, fake snow. It is our hope that our kids will never experience that kind of hardship, where they couldn’t afford to buy something so small. We hope that they continue the tradition and remember that generations before them were not too good to cherish the small things, and they aren’t too good either.
