The Importance of Rituals and Tradition at Christmas

Photo by Tyler Delgado on Unsplash

Optimised calendars. Optimised parenting. Optimised relationships. Even love must now justify its return on investment. But what about repetition? Tradition? According to new research, we are not bound together by efficiency, novelty or constant improvement, but by ritual. It’s families bonding together over the same meal, routine, walking route, a joke told by the same uncle every year  – rituals that look suspiciously like stagnation – that create meaning because they resist change. An overlooked rebellion invited by the holiday season.

Research from 2016 showed that a large number of families sharing and repeating rituals, symbolic activities like Christmas dinner or a New Year’s celebration, were found to feel stronger emotional bonds, have greater perception of meaning out of family life, less conflict and a heightened sense of identity during the holidays. These benefits seem to be specifically generated through structure, predictability and symbolism, rather than just ‘hanging out’, transforming the ordinary into the sacred, the shared. It’s a very different expectation to how we use engage with our lives and development.

It's a facet of culture to treat the holidays like a project ready for optimisation; upgrading traditions, redesigning rituals to make the season ‘worth it’. Rituals juxtapose optimisation, and they work because they’re predictable. It is not the time together that creates significance, but structured and repeated time encompassed in mutual symbolism. Dinner shared together at Christmas is meaningful not because it’s delicious but because it happens again, a reminder that despite a constantly changing existence some things remain. How contradictory to a season obsessed with endings and new beginnings.

Holiday rituals have an emotional function, offering relief to those experiencing stress, loss or lack of identity. While there is much to be considered when ignoring life’s problems, rituals allow people to get together without having to resolve anything. They cannot fix what is broken, like grief or old family wounds, but they evoke a sense of belonging regardless of these maladies. It’s for this reason that rituals feel heavy, bringing to light what has changed, or importantly, what hasn’t.

To the professionally oriented, rituals look inefficient, not knowing the point of repeat something that can be improved or tolerating discomfort in the name of continuity, but rituals shift the meaning of the holidays from performance to presence. A shared ritual does not eliminate tension but shares it into a larger community; we don’t attend holiday rituals because they’re perfect, we attend them because they belong to us.

What would happen if people were to abandon rituals in favour of improvement?

Would there still be meaning or would it evaporate, sterilising and streamlining the holidays, simplifying them, making them more ‘manageable’?

Rituals are one of the few places where meaning is allowed to exist without justification, they don’t need to be rational or productive, but just repeated to make an impact.

Within this discussion, it’s important to recognise what the avoidance of rituals might be in escape of. The impulse to cancel or redesign holiday traditions is not an absence of case but an impulse to avoid discomfort.  In reality, this research is not just about family but about humanity trying to create meaning where meaning is considered optional. Abandoning rituals when life gets busy or in the name of productivity does not bring people together, but disconnects them.

These same dynamics apply to several aspects of our existence, our professional lives, family lives, love lives. Routines and rituals work by creating a shared mental model, unspoken agreements, a sense of belonging. Rituals bypass rational negotiations and speak directly to identity, something a rule or a policy could only attempt. It is not that people must add more rituals into their lives, but to recognise the ones that already exist, what has already been abandoned and a demand of presence.

Presence that, repeated over time, creates meaning.

When looking at rituals from a depth psychology perspective, they work because they operate behind cognition, not through our constant endorsement. Rituals go beyond the rational mind, speaking directly to the unconscious and the psyche experiences meaning through recurrence, not novelty. Jung observed that rituals bring out archetypal patterns such as sacrifice, renewal and belonging, offering the psyche a vessel for complex or contradictory emotions that are too much for conscious resolution. When old roles or unresolved grief are prodded during the Christmas season, rituals act as a space of the psyche to go; we can feel without explanation, belong without needing to agree and grieve in the absence of closure. That is why rituals both evoke comfort and strain as they prompt internal conflict of our past selves. Abandoning ritual leaves the psyche without form, forcing memory and loss to surface without symbolic support.

The full paper published in The Science of Hedonistic Consumption, Vol. 1, 2016, can be found here: Family Rituals Improve the Holidays

Follow The Heretic for reflections on the importance of community, rituals and mental health