Traditions
April 7, 2013
Today is the first Sunday in April which means that millions of Mormons around the world are watching church on TV in what we call General Conference. Conference weekend involves different traditions for lots of people. When I lived in Utah, for instance, it was customary for families to hold really big dinners on Saturday nights during Conference weekend. If your family or friends wanted to go out to eat you’d have to get reservations weeks in advanced because the restaurants were all very full. Here in Ramona I have several friends who get together the Friday before Conference and make homemade cinnamon rolls for their families to eat while watching our church leaders. For my family, the only Conference tradition we have happens at the very end, during the last hours of the Sunday sessions, when we are always invited to watch and visit with some of our friends. After the talks are over we have a meal together. There are always the same three families, and often other visitors too, and the food is always exactly the same. It’s funny how we come to really count on that particular meal. There is nothing extra special about the food (although it is yummy, don’t get me wrong), but the real treat is how comforting it is to sit with the same people twice a year and have the same meal and always enjoy the same feelings of peace.
Later on this week another tradition takes place: Opening Day at the Padres. I’ve already expressed my eagerness for baseball season last week, so I won’t go into this much, except to say that going to the first home game of the season is especially fun. First of all, it’s always sold-out which means there are lots of enthusiastic fans. Second of all, it’s always a day game, which feels a little bit more “pure” to me. Finally, it’s always a give-away night, so that those of us who attend can sport our new caps or shirts all season long. When we see another person wearing the same thing throughout the summer, there’s inevitably a little nod, a brief smile and an unspoken conversation between strangers that says, “we were both there.”
Hopefully, the tradition of going to the Padres Home Opener will continue through the years with another generation of baseball fans being raised in my home. In the case of our General Conference dinner, however, this tradition is at its end. This month our friends will move away to another state. I’m sad about their departure of course, but I’m old enough now to realize that good traditions really don’t need to last forever. I can look back on my childhood and see that many things that were done over consecutive years eventually came to a natural end, and that those endings weren’t even too tearful. That’s one of the great things about traditions: they don’t have to last forever for them to have an impact.
One of my favorite family traditions from my childhood started when my parents were in college. Back then my parents and my dad’s siblings were too poor to buy Christmas presents for everyone. So they started a Christmas draw that had a yearly theme. The tradition lasted as those college kids started their own families, and all the way until their progeny started college themselves. I can tell you that for me and my sister and my cousins this family tradition was so much fun and extremely valuable in building relationships with each other. But after 40 years of thinking of different themes the task eventually became more tiresome than enjoyable and so the tradition ended, without tears and with the hope for new traditions in the future. 
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