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Traditions Can Literally Start Whenever
Published 4/25/26
I remember my first year of marriage, trying to imagine what our family traditions would be.
Holidays, birthdays, the little rituals that make a family feel like a family. When we had our first baby, that weight felt even heavier.
For a long time I believed you could only count it as a tradition if you had started it from the very beginning.
I thought that to do it correctly you had to be able to say "every year" or "every single time" and that was where the value lied.
Perfect consistency over time.
When I lost my four-month-old daughter in 2021, I wanted thoughtful traditions immediately, something I could channel my love into, and something to help her legacy live on long after I was gone. (No pressure.) Her first birthday came and I was disappointed in myself. I'd been waiting for both the energy and the perfect idea, and neither one arrived. The day came and it wasn't what I'd imagined. I felt major mom guilt.
My therapist reassured me I didn't have to figure it all out in the first year. I spent the following year thinking about the next birthday, it came and went, and while we found some ways to celebrate, I still had not found the traditions I hoped for.
My therapist continued to remind me there was no rush, and she asked me about my own traditions growing up. I immediately thought of a Mother's Day tradition my dad initiated.
My dad started a Mother's Day photobook well into parenthood, over a decade into raising kids, not perfectly from the start. It was simple: a single photo of each kid, taped to cardstock, with a handwritten letter from each of us, in a plastic sleeve in a pink binder.
I don't think he started the book with all of the future years in mind, but he started it that year and the next year he did it again. And then it just kind of became tradition. He never went back to cover the years he'd missed, he just started where he was.
I went into my daughter's fourth birthday still without any formal traditions. I wanted everyone to feel a part of something, so I baked four cakes, one for each of us to decorate. It was a total hit, and I thought, wow, we should do this again. And just like that, we finally had a tradition.
I'm grateful to my dad for simply starting, and to my therapist for reminding me that traditions don't have to be forced. They come when you let them.
Losing my daughter taught me many things, 2 of which are:
- Traditions will come on their own, and in their own time. No need to force it.
2.If I wait until I have time to do things as elaborately as I've imagined, they will never happen.
That second one is why I finally stopped waiting to make the perfect baby books and memory books I'd always imagined. I used to be paralyzed by the thought of going all the way back to the beginning and doing it perfectly. But starting in the middle is still starting. Your future self and your future family will thank you for it.
