Traditions

By Volodymyr Kish

Тhis past weekend, my wife and I celebrated an annual tradition that has now been going on for thirty-three years.  It dates back to the time when my wife was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto and living in Toronto.  Between her social life at the University and her involvement with the various activities at the nearby UNF Hall on College Street, she became friends with two other girls, Annie and Olya, a friendship that would last throughout the decades to the present day.

Even after graduation and subsequent marriages, she maintained contact, and in 1977 we had the first of what would become what we affectionately call the annual “Babstvo Picnic” (a term I should note, lest I be accused of any degree of chauvinism, they themselves came up with!).

Initially, it was just the six of us, three married couples, having a summer picnic, enjoying the pryroda at some park or conservation area.  Eventually, in the natural course of events, we all had kids and they became an integral part of and inevitably the central focus of our picnics. All this of course was well documented with the appropriate “Kodak Moments”, and we are now blessed with thirty-three consecutive years of photographs chronicling our passage through life and the various stages of marriage, parenting, family life and more recently, the return of being couples again as the our kids have grown and gone off on their own.

We went through those pictures this past weekend and were moved by the vivid portrayal of our personal passage through time starting with our more carefree years when we still had hair and diet was not a four letter word that we had to worry about.  Year by year, we saw our kids arrive, grow up and become adults in their own right.

The decades passed, and on the male side, our hair became sparser and more grey.  As for the babstvo, there was much nostalgia for those good old days before pregnancies and the stresses of life turned their youthful bodies from prime dancing form into something, let us just say a little more mature.

This has been the longest kept tradition within our personal lives, at least of the ones that we originated and did our best to maintain throughout the decades.  This proved particularly hard during the time when we were living in Ukraine.  Even then, during our annual visits home at Christmas Time, we made a point of having our annual picnic, usually between Christmas and New Year’s.  There was even one year, when I was not able to take Christmas leave and only my wife was back in Canada.  They had the picnic anyway and made an effigy of me so that I was present, if only symbolically.

This is a tradition which all of us who are party to it, treasure immensely.  It is a bond that ties us through not only the physical dimension of time, but also the spiritual dimension of human relationships.

Traditions have always played an important role in every society and social grouping since our caveman days.  They create important bonds that provide a vital sense of belonging and a structure around which we base our activities as human beings, whether it is on a daily or longer term basis.  Traditions are an integral part of our culture and form the basis of a lot our values.

All too often, we tend to think of traditions as being something we inherit from our parents or our ancestors.  Let us not forget though that all traditions have to start somewhere and at sometime, so we should not be afraid to start our own traditions, within our family, our circle of friends or the communities within which we live and spend a good chunk of our daily lives. Our lives will be the richer for it.