a blog about #traditions

Tomorrow, some friends and I are going to get together for a new non-denominational tradition that we’re starting among our local group: Saint Bean’s Feast Day. For us, this is going to be a sort of potluck where every dish must feature at least one bean.

Back in mid-January of this year, we were all at a different friend’s house for a cookout while discussing Berkeley Bowl’s extensive produce selection. It’s the only store I know of that allows you to buy a dozen different types of eggplant.¹ One friend lamented that there were too many to try and that no one would be able to determine the best eggplant without buying many pounds of it. That is, unless we had a party where everyone brought a dish that had a different kind of eggplant in it. We liked the core conceit of the party idea, but none of the rest of us wanted a meal with that much eggplant, so we brainstormed other foods that have a lot of types before deciding on beans.

National Bean Day in the United States is January 6th.² We opted for an alternative date for scheduling Bean Day. We couldn’t…

Growing up, my family had a tradition: every first morning of the month, before you said anything else to each other, you’d say “rabbit rabbit.” It was always the first words of the first of the month, and always two rabbits. Like so many family traditions, I learned the rules and never questioned the origins nor the point of it. It’s just “what you do.”

Years went by, and then in school, a friend of mine and I were talking about family traditions one day, and she mentioned that her family said “rabbit” on the first day of the month. This was the first time I’d ever heard of anyone else doing it, but her family always said one rabbit, not two. We figured this was the same tradition, just that one of us was doing it wrong. We began a competitive game where every month, the first one of us to tell the other rabbit rabbit — or in her case, rabbit — would win bragging rights, as a way to insist our respective version was the correct one.

Over time, we added rules like “it doesn’t matter when the person reads the message, it matters when you sent…