With Tradition Comes Connection 

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”
- Winston Churchill

    Tradition is a critical part of connecting family and community. My Christmas Eve with my extended family is a great example of connecting family. We have so many other traditions inside of the tradition of Christmas dinner. Every year my family hosts a Christmas Eve dinner with 21 people. We have people from different sides of the family. We have cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparent, great aunts and great uncles over. One of the most fun traditions inside of the dinner is the table decorations. My family sets up a table with fun toys and meaningful quotes. We put Christmas crackers, quotes on the table, a candle pyramid with the creche scene and candles all around the table. I have some great memories from the table decorations. I remember everyone reaching over the person to there left or right and saying “want to pull my cracker” and everyone would be talking about the cool toy that they had just got. Everyone would be playing with the toys they had just got with the person next to them. The next thing everyone would do is reading the quote at table setting. We get these quotes the Nesting store in Concord. These quotes are extremely meaning and my family gets a chance to pull the meaning from an otherwise complicated quote. Before the dinner my whole family goes to a church session at our local church. We all sit together and tons of fun singing and being in each other’s company. Just getting a little taste of the story of Christmas and how it came to be can raise the Christmas spirit. Throughout life, tradition can still be extremely helpful to connect with a community or a larger group of people. Tradition is scattered everywhere, sometimes even in places you wouldn’t expect.