One of my friend’s Easter Sunday dinner traditions is to prepare her husband’s grandmother’s potato salad. Apparently, it is quite labor intensive. She wasn’t feeling great yesterday but HAD to make the potato salad. I suggested picking some up at Sam’s Club. She said something to the effect that would result in a mutiny.
Last night on the beach for sunset, I mentioned to one of her adult daughters my suggestion. Sure enough she replied, “As if that would ever be acceptable.”
I am all for family food traditions, but I think there needs to be some flexibility. I used to always make gumbo on Christmas Eve, but my recipe (like the potato salad) is labor-intensive. One year, I just didn’t feel like it and made something else. I do think my ds was a bit disappointed, but he obviously got over it and ate whatever I fixed. Maybe I have better boundaries or an easier time saying, “no,” than my friend.
Do you have any family food traditions that have become too much to continue with? I can tell my friend kind of resents having to make it! I think I’d make my kids make it if they had to have it!
I’m a big fan of giving these recipes to the next generation. Our DD has our brisket recipe, and she makes it well. We don’t bother anymore. Not really labor intensive…but sort of has gotten expensive.
I had to set boundaries on the family traditional foods when I had to start hosting xmas eve and xmas day back to back when my mom got sick. The first year I tried to do it all and I was in tears and a stressed out mess. The next year, I started a new tradition designed to keep my sanity. I don’t think my dad was ever all that happy with the change but he got over it (or at least stopped complaining about it!).
Every year until she died my mom would announce that she was making a modified, easier Thanksgiving and then she would do ahead and make the whole, traditional meal. We kids always said okay and offered to help, but when we arrived, she had done it all. I was secretly glad I got to eat those homemade (even the crust) pies and yeast rolls while I pretended to scold her. But now, no one knows how to make them and she is gone.
I had the same experience after my mom moved to Florida & I took over hosting the extended family Christmas party. It had been dinner, including traditional Polish foods. I followed tradition the first year, and I was a mess from all the prep. The next year, I changed it to appetizers & desserts, and I asked everyone to contribute one or the other. Many years later, I’ve yet to hear a complaint. I think I hit the jackpot with my family!
IMO if someone is upset that you aren’t making a certain dish, hand them the recipe and they can make it. You can sit and whine that it’s not good enough.
Obviously, we don’t have any such traditions in our house.
We have dropped most of the Italian traditional holiday dishes that my husband grew up with (which were made by his Scottish mother who learned from her Italian mother-in-law). Once we were responsible for preparing our own holiday meals, we realized that we didn’t really like them. So no big spread of fish on Christmas Eve, no lamb on Easter, and no breaded asparagus on Thanksgiving. We hope we are creating our own traditions with our daughter that we all enjoy - things like shrimp as our Thanksgiving appetizer.
I think this applies to food…and other traditions. We can over-weight how long something has “always” been a certain way- in most cases if you look hard it’s not more than the grandparent generation! I agree with @kiddie that each family gets to revisit the family ‘traditions’ and cherry pick the ones that they want to keep. I also think that the parent generation should actively be aware of its role in passing on both the joy and the work of the traditions. That adult daughter who said “as if [purchased potato salad] would ever fly” needs to be tasked with making it next year!
Now I have to go look up what “breaded asparagus” is!
eta: just watched a video on making breaded asparagus…looks good enough that I might make it for 2 of us. For a group?! gaaaahhhhhh
I don’t think we have any food traditions. And any that we had have changed over the years as people’s dietary preferences have changed. One of my kids is vegan now so that affects many things I make. I’m going to attempt a vegan lemon cake I saw on the King Arthur Baking website for Easter I think, but no dyed hardboiled eggs this year.
I’m on strike today from holiday meals and it may continue for the foreseeable future.
My mother tells everyone all I eat are “twigs and sticks”, yet every year I prepare an elaborate Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Day meal for my tiny family. There’s enough food for an army because everyone expects the same traditional foods - two kinds of potatoes, dressing, two vegetables, a salad, rolls, two pies (at least!) - I never enjoy the meals because I’m frazzled and exhausted plus it’s not food I want to eat anyway. Then there’s the cleanup. While everyone is relaxed and visiting, I’m doing dishes and putting everything away.
Today my husband is at work so his staff can have family time. My mother is down at church for a breakfast between services. No idea what D and her H are doing. I was supposed to go up there for the weekend but I’m tired of starting Mondays exhausted and broke from a hotel stay and eating out.
If people want family traditions to continue, there comes a time someone younger needs to do it.
We keep adjusting over time. Turns out nobody really liked the traditional Easter meal my lovely MIL used to make. She has passed away and I am now hosting. We have completely changed the menu to suit our tastes and celebrate our interfaith marriage. I guess we are creating new/less formal/more flexible traditions in our house.
For the last many years 3 sisters-in-law have organized the extended family Thanksgiving. This past year one of us (the major domo) had a newly broken leg, and another could not arrive until just before meal time. But- we had all these HS/college/gradschool age kids who have been coasting! so one of them did up a spreadsheet of every.single.task needed to get Thanksgiving done- from prep to clean up- and sent it to everybody. People signed up for what they wanted, and leftover tasks were assigned.
It was great. They all got into the spirit of it- there was lots of camaraderie and esprit de corps. Not much of it was perfect, but all of it was good enough. And 100% we will do it the same way again next year!
I make a point to make my mother’s sausage stuffing whenever we make a turkey, but often I’ve cooked ahead the sautéed sausage /celery / onion).
For many years my mother baked her wonderful dutch apple pie for holidays. Also she’d bring the stuffing cooked and hot, before I picked up that duty. Eventually she decided that Mrs Smith’s frozen dutch apple pie was just as good, so she’d bake/bring that. So that is my “holiday tradition” for one of the desserts… we usually have choices, even if only 3 or 5 of us. Because hey, leftover pie is good for breakfast.
Replying to myself, we do variations on traditional dishes, but we don’t have to make grandma’s version of anything. I usually do monkey bread for Christmas morning, and sometimes a quiche, but that has had to be changed up for the vegan (we used JustEgg fake eggs this year). We are totally not doing anything for Easter this year except I might bake that vegan cake. We are not church-goers so it’s not a big holiday for us and we have a bunch of other stuff going on anyway.
There are some of those traditional recipes that our family simply “ate” to please the elders who made them. We don’t make the sausage stuffing anymore…it was one of those things that people pushed around their plates…we don’t make French Canadian meat pies for New Years. Again…not something anyone really liked. Recipes were handed down, just in case. No more turnip casserole on Thanksgiving. And so on.
Also, many of these recipes our family had were for a large crowd…and frankly cutting them down didn’t work for smaller groups.
We tended to have the same dishes Christmas dinner, but they aren’t anything related to our culture and I don’t think anyone would have complained if we didn’t have a particular dish.
As my siblings and I became adults, we all started to bring sides, dessert, drinks, etc. But it is still a lot of work for my parents (they are in a central location and have space for everyone). So a couple of years ago, we switched it all up and bring a couple of big pans of lasagna from a local deli - and you don’t really need much in the way of sides! It is super easy, but also super delicious!
My husband expects a certain dish - steamed dumplings called manty - to appear on a holiday table at least once a year. He even bought and installed a steam oven to simplify my workflow. Oh, and turkey is a must have thanksgiving dish.
Other than that, our family is pretty flexible about holiday foods.
My family didn’t eat traditional foods on holidays, because my mother was a terrible cook and a health food fanatic who believed sugar and white flour (this was in the 60s–so it was unusual) were poison. My husband’s family did have a few traditional foods for the holidays and we will sometimes incorporate those in our holiday meals. H and I both enjoy cooking and plan our holiday meals in advance.
My issue is trying to accomodate the variety of food requirements of my kids and their friends (vegan, pescatarian, no gluten, dairy-free, etc). Sometimes that’s just exhausting. My younger daughter (pescatarian) and her boyfriend (vegan) will often make their own dishes (which is fine with me). One thing I can count on is that everyone will drink the wine (my H buys really nice wine).
He even bought and installed a steam oven to simplify my workflow. 
Oh, and turkey is a must have thanksgiving dish.