Following Blindly for all the Wrong Reasons

Let me tell you a funny but poignant story I heard many years ago.

Four generations of women and their families gathered for New Years Eve. It was their tradition to fix a large turkey for dinner and this year it was the newlywed, the 4th generation to cook the large bird.

So, as she had been taught by her mother, she got out her large roasting pan, sliced the back end off the turkey and covered the rest with aluminum foil. Her young husband watched and admired his young bride for her complete knowledge of preparing a turkey to cook. But he was a bit perplexed about why she had cut off the back end of the turkey, so he inquired about it. “That is the way my mother always did it.” She replied.

So the young man went to his Mother-In-Law and asked her why she always cut the end off the turkey before cooking it. "Well son, she said, that is how mother taught me to do it and I never thought anything about it; so that is how I do it still.

The young husband sighed. He was an engineer and the answers he was getting just weren’t setting right with him; so he went to his wife’s grandmother and asked her the same question. Again the answer was the same – “that is how I was taught by my mother son.”


“Someone in this family has to know what the science behind this tradition is,” he thought to himself as he approached the elderly great grandmother. “Granny,” he uttered respectfully, “Why do all the women in your family cut the back end off of the turkey before cooking it?”

“Son,” she replied as she sat up in her wheel chair, “I don’t have a clue as to why those silly girls do that. As for me, when I was a young bride I didn’t have a pan big enough to hold a whole turkey so I cut the end off to make it fit.” The three younger women dropped their chins nearly to the floor when they discovered that what they thought was a family secret for cooking a good turkey actually turned out to be one generation after another carrying on a tradition that didn’t exist and had no positive benefit.

This time of year you may be spending time with relatives and that gives you an opportunity to look at the habits and traditions that your families have created either willfully or unconsciously; now is the time to decide which of those habits and traditions are positive and productive and should be preserved. And there are others that should be abandoned like drinking too much, staying so long that angry words start to fly, or realizing that you want to create some of your own traditions that will benefit your own family.

How can you make your family traditions so wonderful for your children and grandchildren that they will always remember them with joy and anticipation? What do you need to do to stop traditions that end up with children feeling left out, or people getting sloshed or rude or hurtful? You have control over your life. And you can make choices that will ensure that your immediate family lives happier lives because of the choices you made early on. Be more concerned about making yourself and your children happy than you are about the possibility of hurting someone else’s feelings – they are adults – they are capable of dealing with their own feelings; you are not in charge of monitoring their reactions to what you say or do.


1. Be independent and do what is right for your family.

2. Don’t feel so obligated to blindly follow old traditions, especially if they take away from your happy moments with your immediate family.

3. Remember what I say: “The choices you make today will determine your tomorrow; choose wisely!” Karen Dougherty MS