Like Toothpaste; The Dysfunctional Guide to Family Traditions

I used to be addicted to kid magazines like Parents, Parenting , and Child. I mean, I used to read these things before I had kids. What I really liked were the stories about Real Families, those fantasy stories where they have actual sibling rivalry and eat at the table together.

I didn’t have a bad family. Still, I was an only child, both parents worked, and my father ate his dinner in front of the TV in the living room while I ate mine in bed with my plate on a pillow and a book propped up on my knees. (To this day I'm not sure where or when my mother ate.)

These magazines have recurring articles about Family Traditions, how important they are, and Look Here’s Some You Can Do At Your House.

I used to believe these articles. I thought that all you had to do was make the decision to develop traditions. You just (pick one) read aloud from inspirational literature for ten minutes after dinner every night, or make turkey alfredo every year the day after Thanksgiving at 11:48 a.m., or make everyone wear green hats on St. Patrick's Day, and the kids will rush to participate in the newly created tradition.

I have found that in real life, the only traditions we seem to have are those that take on a life of their own and just show up one day. Sometimes we don’t even remember why we do them or who started them, but hey, there they are. Here are some of ours:

Bad Words
One year my first two kids wanted to watch a video that was not a bad movie, exactly (no blood, guns, sex, puppy or hamster abuse, etc.) but did have a main character that said Bad Words a lot. I didn’t want to let them watch it, my husband did. So we rented the thing and they watched it. Every time someone said a Bad Word in the movie, I found myself saying, “Oops, Bad Word!"

It was a reflexive thing. I couldn’t help it. I just had to make sure they knew that these were indeed Bad Words and that I, Mommy, did not approve of them.

I ended up doing this with every movie we ever watched ever again. We don’t let the kids watch stuff that is beyond their rating--well, not much beyond (no, we are not showing R movies to five-year-olds) but heck, even Disney movies have characters that say “Oh, my God" all the time (not that “God" is a bad word per se, but it’s frequently used in an inappropriate context even in PG movies, and certainly in PG-13 ones).

What I didn’t expect was that the kids would end up doing it too. A character in what appeared on the box to be a perfectly nice movie spouts a “Damn!" and my kids, when they are elementary-school age, spout “Bad word!" They grow out of it, of course. Ages five to eight seem to be about the stage when they like to yell “Bad word!" at a movie.

Before I had kids, I thought we'd play Scrabble instead of watching TV. At the very least, I thought we'd watch only G-rated stuff (maybe Disney movies from the 1960’s? hey, I loved them). Instead, they have learned to identify bad words.

I can live with it.

Cereal
Then there’s cereal. We love cereal around here. Once when the first kids were little (everything starts with the first kids) we were visiting their Grandma in Dallas, and she offered to fix them cereal. They informed her that they would like it “in a bowl with milk and a spoon." She was a bit miffed by that—"You think I don’t know how to serve cereal?"

What she didn’t realize was that at our house, dry cereal also served as a snack. So you had your choice of cereal two ways—"in a bowl with milk" or “in a cup" (with no milk and no spoon). It’s not the Waltons, but I think it qualifies as a tradition. Twelve years later, our youngest children still specify whether they want their cereal with milk.

Christmas Sing-Alongs--Well, Sort Of
Then there’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." One Christmas we were doing “Breakfast With Santa" at a local sporting goods store. It ended with a rousing sing-along of Christmas songs for the kids. You know how the song goes, and probably also how the inserts go, right? “Had a very shiny nose . . . “ and the kids yell, “Like a light bulb!"

Back to Breakfast With Santa: At the end of the song, everyone sang, “You’ll go down in his-tor-yyyy!" and my kids yelled, "Like toothpaste!"

No one else yelled “Like toothpaste." They all yelled, “Like Columbus!" My kids were singing louder though, so toothpaste won.

Until that moment, I actually hadn’t even realized that everyone didn’t say Like Toothpaste at the end of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Our kids sang it that way, and I just figured that's the way it was. Now I think that maybe they heard “Columbus" somewhere and got confused and thought it was “toothpaste," but who knows. Maybe it's that way in a movie . . .

So we still sing the song ending in "like toothpaste." Well, I do, anyway. My nine-year-old, being more socially adept than the rest of us, knows it’s “Columbus," and she can’t figure out why I insist on singing “toothpaste" instead.

But hey, you gotta respect tradition.