On Family Rituals

They're everywhere if you know where to look

I’ve been thinking about rituals a lot lately. This is partly because the holidays, with all their attendant traditions, are upon us, and like most people, we find so much comfort in the predictability of our family’s little touchstones: The back-and-forth emailing with my mom and siblings’ and nieces and nephews to figure out the Thanksgiving menu; going for our morning family turkey trot (or talking about it at least); saying what we’re grateful for around the table; decorating my mother-in-law’s famous-to-us holiday cookies, A Charlie Brown Christmas playing in the background; trimming the tree while eating latkes; giving our daughter a boost (even though she’s now a full-fledged adult) to affix the angel on top of that tree. It’s not just the activities themselves, of course — it’s looking forward to them, too. As British novelist Jeanette Winterson once wrote, a ritual has “anticipatory relevance.” We prepare for it, practically and psychologically, and that’s a big part of the benefit.

But mostly I’ve been thinking about everyday rituals, which some of you might know was the topic of my 2016 book, How to Celebrate Everything. Ever since last fall, when we downsized from our house in the suburbs to an apartment in New York, I’ve been almost manic about finding new family rituals for this new phase of our lives. Our suburban house was the keeper of my daughters’ entire childhoods (I still have a hard time writing that sentence), and I was determined to make them see our new Upper West Side life not just as “Mom & Dad’s Empty Nest Adventure” but as