Traditions

The Art of Gathering

Priya Parker · 2018

Parker is a conflict mediator who turned her attention to dinners, weddings, funerals and the annual family thing everybody dreads. Her argument is that most gatherings run on autopilot: we repeat the form long after we have forgotten the purpose, and then wonder why it feels flat. She is not against tradition. She is against unexamined tradition, which is a very different thing, and the chapter on how to end an occasion properly is worth the price on its own.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Lisa See · 2005

Two girls in nineteenth-century Hunan are bound together as laotong, a formal lifelong friendship arranged by a matchmaker, and write to each other in nu shu, a script women invented and taught only to each other. See is writing about customs that were genuinely brutal and genuinely sustaining at the same time, which is the honest position on most inherited practice. The foot-binding chapters are hard going and the friendship is worth them.

Home Cooking

Laurie Colwin · 1988

Essays about feeding people, written by a New York novelist with a tiny kitchen and no interest whatever in perfection. There are recipes, and there are also the disasters, the dish she has made for the same friends for fifteen years, the eggplant nobody liked. What it captures better than any cookbook is how a household accumulates its own private customs: the thing always served, the pot always used, the person who always sits there.

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens · 1843

Worth returning to as an adult, because it is not really a book about generosity. It is a book about a man being shown his own past, present and future by way of the customs he has refused to keep, and about a household that goes on having its goose and its toast whether or not he approves. Dickens more or less invented the modern English Christmas while writing it, which makes it an odd and useful case: a tradition can be about eighty years old and still feel ancient.

The Making of Home

Judith Flanders · 2014

Flanders traces where our domestic customs actually came from: why we eat at that hour, why the front room exists, when the family meal became a moral matter, how much of what feels timeless was invented in the nineteenth century by people selling something. It is a history rather than a lament, and the effect is oddly liberating. A good deal of what you feel obliged to do turns out to be quite recent and entirely optional.

Cranford

Elizabeth Gaskell · 1853

A small town run almost entirely by women of limited means and considerable rules: what is called on, at what hour, in what order, and what may never be mentioned. Gaskell is gently funny about the absurdity of it and completely clear-eyed about what it is for. Their customs are how a group of people with very little money keep their dignity and look after each other without anyone having to admit that is what is happening.

Midnight Chicken

Ella Risbridger · 2019

Risbridger was, in her own account, on a kitchen floor and not at all sure she wanted to go on, and what got her up was deciding to roast a chicken. The book is recipes braided through with the small repeated acts that hold a life together. It belongs here because it shows a tradition being made rather than inherited: this is what we do now, in this flat, on this evening, because we decided it.