traditions

i really don't mean to get so nostalgic but a friend just posted photos of the new beaujolais and i was thrown back in time to 2009 when i was at her beaujolais party. so beaujolais is a french wine with a marketing strategy that's better than their wine. every year, there's le beaujolais nouveau and people host parties to celebrate its release. that year, i was in stockholm on exchange - a period i remember too fondly. 

on the day of C's party, the mister had returned to singers in the afternoon (to sit the bar exam no less!*) and J, my lovely french friend, had invited me to join her at french-swedish C's wine party. we couldn't even find a bottle of le beaujolais nouveau 2009, having left it so late in the day, and ended up going with the previous years. party guest fail. four years on, C and her sambo (swedish term for unmarried partner) are proud parents to two adorable little boys, J has moved to sydney and is in a civil partnership with A, her aussie love from our time on exchange, and the mister and i are london-based and have been married for over a year. marriage is so culturally relative and it's nice how each of us has found love and expresses commitment our own way.

oh! but this was supposed to be about traditions. i don't have many and think it's high time the mister and i started coming up with some for our little family of two. what makes traditions hard, to me, is the reproducibility. last year, we had a christmas tree and the mister roasted a christmas goose. almost twelve months on, we are still impaling unsuspecting tootsies with needles from said tree. and goose? once was enough. beaujolais nouveau parties are a tradition i wish i could get into, but not being french, nor able to truly appreciate the wine, it borders on fraudulent to randomly throw one too.

and that's the thing about traditions! how do you take something and make it your own? i'm all for organic traditions but save for glorious weekend lie-ins and HIMYM marathons, we need something with a little more edge. routine is also something we're not big fans of, and routine just seems to be the uncool cousin of tradition. i've friends who take one occasion and make it their thing. like how someone always always hosts a new year's eye party, someone else has a themed birthday celebration every year, yet another person (non-american, too!) can be counted on to host a huge thanksgiving 'do... which's great! maybe a big part of that is not moving, about having a group of friends who count on you to do certain things. as relatively recent transplants to london, we're still getting to know people, compounded by the little inconvenient detail that it takes me twenty years to warm to someone (the mister is lucky, it only took me five years to fall for him). 

or maybe it takes having children to form a tradition, because you want to gift them with the security that mama and papa do as they say. haha. kids. there's still so much we want to see and do before starting a family, so maybe starting a tradition can wait till then, too.

*it's not fair! he spent the two weeks study leave with me in stockholm and sardinia, didn't open his books once, and still manages to come in top 20 out of 300 candidates.