When our children were small, we had a few Christmas traditions. We would drive about an hour to a town that had an annual display of Christmas lights in the park, sponsored by local businesses. We would go on the Friday before Christmas, and we kept this tradition through snowstorms and other lousy weather. Often, it seemed we were taking unnecessary risks just to maintain the tradition. Eventually, everyone got tired of it, and the tradition was dissolved.

There’s a difference between tradition and ritual. Where our annual drive to see the Christmas lights in the park stemmed from a desire to do something with our kids to celebrate the holiday season, the practice of ritual develops from a need to express deep emotion in the heart. This can be commemorating a milestone or acknowledging grief, but either way, it means creating practices that express the emotions surrounding an experience. Using natural elements like fire, earth, water, and food, we can create our own unique practices that show reverence to our experience and the emotions involved. We validate what we’ve been through by ritual, and it offers us the opportunity to befriend life.

Traditions can be nice, but continuing them because “that’s what we’ve always done” often leads to boredom or at worst, resentment. Ritual, on the other hand, allows us to create meaningful containers to hold our emotions, acknowledging what we’ve been through.