Why Heritage Matters

“It is not the honor that you take with you, but the heritage you leave behind.”
-Branch Rickey quotes (US baseball player, 1881-1965)


This post has been a long time coming, and had I been smart I would have written this BEFORE I started posting about all of the unusual “heritage” celebrations and traditions that take place in our household. You’ve seen them – the Walpurgis Night post, Midsummer post, and many others are still to come throughout this year and many years to come. So, you may ask, why celebrate traditions that your relatives and ancestors may have done, not just 20 years ago, but maybe 200 or 2000 years ago? Isn’t that a little…um…weird? Go ahead and admit it – it’s a little – cuckoo! Well, that’s what I wanted to explain in this post – why heritage matters.

I have always been interested in two things – genealogy/family history, and traditions. My parents used to joke that they didn’t dare start anything new on a particular holiday when I was young, or we would end up doing it over and over and…OVER. This little quirk of my personality explains why my family ended up sitting in the cold and yes, sometimes icy or snowy, weather in Bog Garden (a nearby park/natural area) each January 1st in the morning. One unseasonably warm New Year’s Day when I was young we came up with the fun and random idea to have a “breakfast picnic” at Bog Garden. It was so much fun that in my mind it immediately became a “must do” for each New Years – warm OR rain, snow, ice, whatever. And it did. Much to my parents chagrin, as they had to choose between sucking it up, bundling up, and doing it, OR listening to my whiny little self say over and over, “But y’all, it’s a tradition!” If you had known what an annoying kid I could be, the bundling up and doing it was the easier option. So they did.

So, when you combine such love for genealogy AND traditions, you get someone who loves to research the traditions of the cultures and countries that their ancestors came from. From the limited research that I’ve done and hearsay that I have from previous generations, my genealogic makeup in an absolute European smorgasbord of Scotch-Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, Welsh, German-Dutch, and French. Whew! David’s family, from what I can tell, is at very least part Irish with British thrown in (as I recently found through some research – not sure why we didn’t get invited to the Royal Wedding ;-) ). I’m hoping to know more specifics about all of these mixes soon as I am planning to get started with some serious family tree research on Ancestry.com. I hope to find out more about David’s family background for sure. But for now, the nationalities are a pretty easy guide to go by when researching customs.

SO, I have a ball spending downtime researching what customs, traditions, and holiday celebrations from these cultures we can celebrate and pass down to our kids. I have a Norwegian cookbook, for example, and one of David’s favorite recipes so far of our marriage has been the Norwegian Meatball Casserole I made the first winter we were married. And the holidays – oh the holidays! I have had an absolute blast with these. Most of you will remember our post on celebrating Walpurgis Night, which is a primarily a German and Swedish celebration. Or, our relatively recent post on Midsummer, celebrated all throughout Europe but particularly in Sweden and Norway.

You see, I don’t want David and I, or our future children, to forget where we came from. Whether it be through genealogical research, stories of family members passed down for generations, fun things our families did with us as a kid, or celebrations from a distant European land long ago and far away where, maybe, just maybe, our relatives did some of the same things we are doing in our NC backyard these days. Not only is it fun, it’s IMPORTANT. It’s part of our identity. It’s not enough for me for my children to know that their maternal grandmother’s family is from West Virginia; it’s only enough when they know that their great great grandfather purchased an entire WV coal mining town and split it into parcels to be sold. It’s not enough for them to know that all four great grandfathers (both of my grandfathers and both of David’s) fought in WWII; it’s only enough when they know that their Great Grandfather McRae was an army tank gunner that served under General George Patton, and that their Great Grandfather Andrews witnessed many of his close friends getting killed on the front lines right next to him in Japan). It’s not enough for them to know that they have Norwegian in their blood; it’s only enough when they know the taste of Norwegian dishes that their ancestors probably ate long ago, chosen by those ancestors with specific nutrients to help them get through a life of long cold winters close to the arctic circle. Knowing some, but not all, is just not good enough for me. I want David, myself, and our future children to know the perseverance and strength of those in our family that went before us, as well as the love and laughter, and that, when things get hard, they have these traits in them, too. And why wait until we have children? I want David and I to be able to have that type of pride, now, in where we came from. That’s why heritage matters to me. And that’s why there will be so many blog posts in our future of “weird” holidays and odd customs. Some from long ago and far away, and some from our own parents and childhood. Like the sausage balls David’s family always ate during the Christmas season, which I learned to make during our first married Christmas.

There are so many things to learn about our past, and to pass onto the next generation. When we have children, we will find time to teach them about these things as we continue to learn about them ourselves. They will know where they came from and how they became who they are. Maybe we’ll even teach them on New Year’s morning – shivering in the ice and snow – while we eat leftover sausage balls. :-)