Welcome!

Welcome to the Traditions Traditions Traditions blog!

What is this blog and why am I setting it up?

This blog is a blog about traditions.

What traditions, you ask?

Every tradition!

Literally, every tradition.



National traditions. Local traditions. Holiday traditions. Sporting traditions.  Religious traditions. Family traditions. Internet traditions. College traditions. Famous traditions. Obscure traditions. The whole shebang. Anything that can be called a tradition. I'm not excluding dead traditions, but the emphasis will be on living traditions.
 
I'm fascinated by traditions of every kind!

 I mean "tradition" in its popular sense. So I'm talking about things such as holidays, customs, rituals, parades, pranks, and so forth. I'm not tying myself to any particular definition, but don't expect essays on the Marxist tradition of literary criticism, or the Jungian tradition of psychoanalysis.


This blog is for everybody. I'm a conservative Catholic who has been writing a Catholic-themed blog called Irish Papist since 2011, and who has published a book about Catholic saints entitled Inspiration from the Saints. I also moderate the Irish Conservatives Forum.

Nevertheless, my hope is that this blog will be enjoyed by all sorts of people, regardless of political or religious affiliation.

I want this blog to be fun. I've written some articles for Ireland's Own, a family and general interest magazine in Ireland, and I'm aiming for the same breezy, chatty style. I'm not going to go into tedious detail about any particular tradition.



 To my great surprise, there doesn't appear to be a blog of this kind on the internet already. I know, because I've gone looking. Even if there is, I reckon there's room for another.

 I hope you enjoy it. Keep it traditional!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Rubber Duck

Image
The appeal of the rubber duck is well conveyed in a passage from Right Ho, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse, published in 1934. The young aristocrat Bertie Wooster, embroiled as usual in several different dilemmas, finds one as he is taking a bath in his aunt's stately home: The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. I can't remember ever owning a rubber duck in childhood. Like many of the trappings of childhood, I only experienced rubber ducks when I was an adult. Plenty of bath toys, but no rubber ducks.
Read more

The Garden Gnome

Image
For the second tradition featured on this blog, I am going to have a look at a quintessential English tradition-- the garden gnome. As I'm an anglophile, I expect English traditions will feature quite heavily on Traditions Traditions Traditions! A garden gnome is generally a statuette of an old man with a white beard, dressed in a cap and wearing colourful clothes, which is placed in a garden. He is often smoking a pipe. The concept of a gnome, the mythological creature itself, was first introduced by the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (died 1541). He described a gnome as an earth elemental. In European folklore, gnomes are also seen as tiny beings who guard buried treasure and-- most relevant to garden gnomes-- help on the farm. Garden gnomes seem to be associated predominantly with England, although they actually originated in Germany. Here, they were called Gartenzwerge (garden dwarfs) and began to be made in the 1870s, in the central German town of Gräfenroda. These ga
Read more

Popcorn at the Movies

Image
What will be the very first tradition I write about on this blog? Well, as it happened, the first that "popped" into my head was popcorn at the movies. I imagine I'm going to include a lot of movie traditions, since I'm an avid cinema-goer (at least, I used to be), and I love the ritual and aesthetics of the movie-going experience. But as it happens, I've hardly ever eaten popcorn in the cinema. In fact, I've rarely ever eaten anything at the movies. My ritual was to have a medium-sized Coke, and nothing to eat. My own personal tradition was not to take my first sip until the trailers began. Coke might be my favourite drink and it never tastes better than at the movies. I rarely get to the cinema these days-- not out of lack of interest, but for more mundane reasons. I'm also trying to drink less Coke (which I could swig all day long), so I've been more likely to have orange juice or milk in the cinema. But rarely popcorn! As it happens,
Read more