Traa-di-shon! Tradition!

Yeah, I guess it’s been a while since I posted. Well, in case you didn’t catch it in the comments in Thursday’s post, my boyfriend and I broke up. So I’ve been trying to avoid doing too much thinking, which means a decrease in blog posts. Don’t worry, I’m feeling much better thanks to my amazing roommates, and of course there’s no cure for break-up blues like the holidays, so I’m back.

So about the holidays: I highly doubt if anyone could find a more tradition-bound family than mine at this time of year. Almost all of my mom’s siblings’ families live within an hour drive of my grandmother’s house in East Millcreek, so we get together a lot during the holidays. (More than usual—the extended family gets together at least twice a month as it is. I miss them when I’m stuck in Provo.) And the 30-40 of us can sure have a lot of fun. Who needs friends when you have family? Anyway, as a result of spending massive amounts of time together, traditions just seem to spring out of nowhere. Almost every single day of this season has its own special traditions.

The day before Thanksgiving is officially known as Pie Day in the Miller family. We fill the kitchen of my grandmother’s house with enough estrogen to scare away men for miles around. Large amounts of Chinese food are consumed as the pies are prepared for Thanksgiving and a Christmas movie plays in the background. This year we only needed sixteen pie crusts, a record low, I think. There was one year we made over 30 pies. In order to chill all the pie dough, we had to empty out the ice cube maker in the freezer. An unsuspecting uncle wandered in looking for a glass of water and ended up with a glass full of pie crust—in the Miller family, we have pie crust on tap!

Then Thanksgiving itself: we usually cook a couple turkeys in several different ways. My uncle Dennis, when he was alive, would always deep-fry a turkey. Holy cow is that good stuff! This year we had a brined turkey in addition to the normal roasted version. We usually have about 40 pounds of mashed potatoes—can’t risk running out. Lots of homemade rolls and cranberry sauce. But my favorite traditional food is rainbow jello. I made it this year—it takes about 3 hours—and it was really good.

After dinner, we laze around for a few hours. There’s usually a Christmas craft project—candy advent calendars this year—and football on the TV. Everyone continues snitching food, grazing as their stomachs settle down. In a few hours, we’ll clear everything off and set out the pies. Once we’ve all had pie, we officially open the Christmas season by singing along to “Sleigh Ride” by the Osmonds—not “Jingle Bells/Sleigh Ride,” the real “Sleigh Ride.” You can’t get it on CD. We had to get it transferred from the record. :D Anyway, we all sing at the top of our lungs, doing the air guitar and sliding up to high falsetto parts. It’s great! That song means Christmas and family in my mind. When I’m feeling homesick, I’ll turn it on, be it December or July. Then we draw names for the Christmas gift exchange.

My dad and I always do Black Friday shopping together. The last few hours of Thanksgiving day are spent perusing the newspaper ads, planning our attack strategy. This year we were up at 3:30 AM, outside Circuit City at 4, inside at 5, and out at 5:30. We did pretty well: I got a 1 GB SD memory card for $3, a 1 GB flash drive for $4, and a 7 megapixel digital camera for $130. We managed to also hit Target ($4 DVDs, newer releases too), FYE (the new Media Play—I picked up some new headphones and got to talk to a really interesting lady in the line. She works for the railroad.), and RC Willey (Marisa—we have a new DVD player! How much do you love me?). All in all, it was a pretty good year for the bargain hunters. To me, it’s like a game to plan the best strategy for dodging the crowds in the stores and to guess which items will go first. Yeah, it’s a little materialistic and, oh, insane, but then again, it’s way fun and I save a bunch of money.

The holidays are sort of a weird time for me. Usually, I value my alone time a lot. I'm quite "solitary as an oyster." (You better know where that's from.) But during Christmas, I can't get enough of people. I just want to be around them. We don't necessarily have to do anything; it's enough just to be. To quote a Christmas classic: "I’m crowded, but at least I’m loved."

My Philosophy of Fun

Wednesday night at institute our stake president's wife said something that might have been a slip of the tongue--or just a poorly constructed sentence--which I can't stop thinking about. It went something like this: "Being single is a time to practice vital life skills and habits you will need when you get married, like eating right, exercising, self-discipline, following the commandments, and having fun."

Having fun as a life skill, huh? I like it. I think I'll have much more fun working on that than many of the others. :D More than a little dry humor there, but still it's set me thinking: is the ability to have fun a life skill?

I've come to the conclusion that yes, it probably is. It involves knowing when you are taking too much work on yourself (work-a-holics, this means you!) and being able to take time off to just do things that are fun. Yes, work can sometimes be fun--I'll admit I pretty much love writing English essays for school--but don't you think there is a difference between the fun you have enjoying your work and fun you have just having fun? When you start transforming your hobbies into work, they lose some of the element of fun. For instance, when I started knitting something as a wedding present for a friend, instead of just fooling around making stuff for me, knitting took on a new character--still fun, but sort of a burden at the same time. Somehow not as relaxing as before.

And that's the main thing about having fun, I think: relaxing. Fun is sort of like the sleep we can do while we're awake: you can be free from the constraints that every day life puts upon you and just have a good time, doing something for no other reason than because you enjoy it. Not to create a finished product, not to hone your skills, or learn things, or help others, or even to spend quality time with other people (which is a kind of work--at least if you are me). Just for fun. It's like CS Lewis and an essay I read at the Writing Center both said: what is the purpose of a sport? Not to win, but to have fun (which is why games get boring when people become too competitive).

It's the same reason I play video games, or ARGs, since that's what I'm into now: to do something that doesn't count. Unlike real life where the ending is crucial, there is (usually) no eternal consequence to a game. You can just do things without the pressure you feel in real life.

So get out there and have fun.

If you need a game to play, ask me for a copy of the rules I recently devised for a backwards scavenger hunt, inspired by the Zen Scavenger Hunt on Avant Game. We played it at FHE and it was one of the best activities I've had in a long time, and hilarious too. What's the key to world domination? Why, a plunger, of course!

And now I'm going to go run in the rain while the thunder is still going!