I never knew that some of our family Christmas traditions were so unusual until I recounted them to some friends and realized we were the only family that had these traditions.
During my student teaching experience, I walked into our holiday program and was surrounded by an hour and a half of traditions that I didn’t know. There were songs with hand motions that I was supposed to be joining in. As I looked around, I tried to move my lips with an exaggerated W…A…T…E…R….M….E…L…O…N to look as if I knew the words, which worked well until my hand motions gave me away. My hands were up when everyone else’s were down and they were down when everyone else’s were up.
Fiddler on the Roof offers:
How do we keep our balance? TRADITION!
But what if we get so deep into our traditions that we don’t know where the traditions started or why they were started?
What if we are on cruise control, knee deep in “what we always do” and we miss what our students need?