Traditions And Christmas

December 25, 1985|By Wallace Denton, a Purdue University professor who founded and heads the school`s Marriage and Family Therapy Center.

Searching for the spirit of Christmas? Its ghost is locked deep within traditions--of Christmas Past and Christmas Yet to Come.

Tradition. Let it flow, and it warms the soul and brightens holidays and homes. But block its path and look out! If someone used to opening gifts on Christmas Eve marries a Christmas-Day present opener, the tinsel is going to fly. It helps to have a healthy respect for the power of tradition;

traditions are part of the soul, and the soul is easily scratched.

Traditions are especially potent for children; a ritual--a prescribed order for hanging ornaments, for example--fills them with security.

Such traditions also add a dimension of family solidarity and affirm our identity as a family. I remember when my father was a sharecropper in Arkansas. Very often, after we had come in from the fields, we`d gather on the porch and spontaneously start singing and playing our guitar, fiddle and harmonica. Nowadays when I go home, my sisters and I still gather at the piano to sing and play. In some mystical sense, we reaffirm our connection with the broader clan.

If you`d like to cultivate traditions in your family, identify and encourage those that have sprung up on their own. Next, observe other families to see if they have traditions you`d like to try. But be careful. Traditions can hurt when you insist on hanging on to them even after you`ve outgrown them. Why insist your adult daughter and her three little children come every Christmas Day--especially when her in-laws live in Cincinnati, you live in Chicago and she lives in St. Louis?

So nurture the ghost of Christmas Past, but be sure it doesn`t dampen the spirit of Christmas Yet to Come.