The World Serious

It’s World Series time, and I’m watching it with a plastic container of Chex Mix within arm’s reach. Why? Because that’s what my family does when it’s World Series time.

Why?

In the words of that famous baseball sage, Tevye, “tradition.”

Somewhere beginning in the early 1970s, watching the World Series with Chex Mix became a religion in our house. My brother and I would race home from school for an afternoon game and sit with our salty fingers, entranced by Rollie Fingers’ mustache or Joe Morgan’s “chicken wing.” I’m pretty sure this is when I first took notice of Johnny Bench, since it seemed like the Reds were always in the World Series. My Johnny Bench crush was real. Is real. If you can’t quote Johnny Bench’s one line of dialogue from that episode of The Partridge Family, then you are not a real fan. One day, maybe I’ll blog about The Johnny Bench Incident, when I met my baseball hero in person as an adult. It was simultaneously exhilarating and humiliating, as most of my celebrity encounters are.

Our mom was a Pete Rose fan. She sent him a birthday card one year. We knew from our mom that “Reggie Jackson bought his mother a Cadillac,” so we knew where the bar was when it came to gifts. Periodically, she reminds of this even now. Why?

It’s tradition.

This World Series of Chex Mix Eating has made me think about family traditions. What I concluded is that, not surprisingly, my family’s are funny. My family is funny. We think we are the funniest people on the planet. We think we are so funny that we are collecting sitcom material based on our family, and we have our Emmy acceptance speech nearly finished. So, we’re funny -- and overly confident. And a bit delusional.

If you ask someone in my family, what’s for dinner, they will say, “Bushes.” It’s hilarious.

If you say “Oops,” someone will immediately ask, “What’d you say?”

(Do you want to know how many Cosby albums were passed down in my family? Answer: all of them.)

Seeing a digital clock turn from 5:59 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and being the one to say “I saw the clock turn to six” is a badge of honor. You don’t even want to know how we’ve each set ourselves up over the years to 1) see the clock and 2) prevent others from seeing you see the clock. These kinds of traditions take work.

Is it really Thanksgiving if there’s no green bean casserole on the table? You know the one I’m talking about. Not only do we have it every year, but we have it in the same dish. Speaking of Thanksgiving, if your brothers complain about lumps in the mashed potatoes every year, is it tradition or bullying? Now I purposely leave lumps in there - for spite. I mean for tradition. 

Can you create a family tradition deliberately? (Pinterest users and that awful Elf on a Shelf would say yes.) Or do they happen and eventually you notice they happen all the time? Traditions, by definition, require some intentionality. Some say they define us, providing a source of identity for a family. They create a deeper family bond, psychologists say. (I would hate to hear some psychologist ruminate on the Horrigan family traditions.) I can say with absolute certainty that we did not set out deliberately to tell each other bushes were on the dinner menu. Traditions are generally passed down from one generation to the next. In my family, I hope not. It would be too hard to explain.

Sure, we found toothbrushes in our Easter baskets and pajamas under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, but was my mom creating a tradition or just being practical? When we set out to create “family pyramids” for photos, were we just trying to see where the breaking point was? I don’t recall it being that deliberate. It just was.

Other people’s traditions seem so weird, and ours seem so normal. When I first visited my in-laws and discovered they all ate breakfast together and not in their pajamas with the newspaper in front of them, I thought that was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. He, on the other hand, thought it was bizarre that breakfast time at my family’s house was “whenever you get up.”

When my nieces were little, for some reason we took a photo with me sitting with my back against the kitchen cabinet with little Katie perched between my outstretched legs and baby Colleen in her lap. How many times have we recreated that pose in the last 27+ years? Dozens at least. Some in the kitchen, others not, but in that same order. Is it OCD or tradition that makes us assume the position and find it hilarious every time?

I’ll bet there are families that hold hands around a perfectly decorated Martha Stewart Christmas tree and sing Silent Night on Christmas Eve. That’s not my family. For my money, that’s the best tradition of all.

Now, who wants the peanuts I picked out of the Chex Mix because that’s tradition, too.