On timeless tradition
And what it means to preserve identity
Some traditions start with something small and evolve into something new and greater. A tradition might look different, but you can trace it back to its origins, and it all aligns with modern versions. I thought that was the case for fireworks and celebrations.
I particularly thought of American Independence Day and wondered how it was originally celebrated. Surely, I thought, the revolutionaries honored independence in some other, older fashion, like shooting in the air. But I was entirely wrong. Fireworks were always part of the celebration.
The tradition is old. Fireworks sprang up in China around 200 BC, first as bamboo thrown into fire, later as gunpowder, sometime between 600 and 900 AD. By the 13th century, they had reached Europe, where they became a fixture of royal courts and festivals.
That lineage was already centuries deep by the time settlers carried it to the Americas, and it found its American form in Philadelphia on July 4, 1777, when a spontaneous citywide celebration closed with a display of fireworks over the Commons.
The Sons of Liberty set off their own that same night in Boston. Year by year, the tradition spread until it became a national one, and though some cities have tried to fight it back for safety and environmental reasons, it remains strong, almost invincible.
From this, we learn of two types of tradition. There is the one that evolves, and the one that remains the same. This intact tradition is one of the most powerful ways to connect to our roots and identity. Almost unchanged, it becomes the closest thing we have to time travel. No matter where we live in the timeline, we are united by the same act.
I think of my ancestral town, nestled into snowy mountains, and how little separates my grandparents’ festivals from the ones held there today. The same songs get sung. The same dances get danced. When my relatives travel back from the city, they aren’t visiting a place so much as stepping into a version of time that never quite ended.
It’s a strange kind of company, being united with people you’ve never met, and generations you never knew, through nothing more than a song everyone still remembers the words to. I wonder sometimes if that’s the real inheritance, not the melody itself, but the fact that no one ever had to write it down for it to survive.
These types of traditions feel endangered. We are a transient society now, moving to different cities, countries, and states. I experience this in South Florida, where many people and families are first-generation residents, or can only go back one or two generations before they are somewhere else. Cemeteries, universities, churches, and other family points of reference get scattered around the world, and it’s hard to pinpoint your history.
When culture and history are dispersed, sometimes the static tradition doesn’t survive the move. And that’s okay. It becomes the other kind: an evolved one. Italian Americans have unique foods and traditions that don’t, or no longer, exist in Italy. Cuban Americans eat food daily that has rarely been eaten or experienced since the 60s by people still on the island. Distance and time force old traditions to marry new ones, and that marriage tells a story with more layers than the original ever had.
Though there are two distinct types of tradition, you can’t ignore the beginning. A tradition is only a tradition after repetition, whether the moment that started it was an accident or an intention.
We can create traditions on purpose: a weekly dinner, a yearly trip, and if they’re repeated long enough, they harden into something that outlives the reason we started them. My grandparents’ village didn’t choose to become a place outside of time. It just kept doing the same thing long enough that the doing became the place.
I don’t know yet which kind of tradition my own children will inherit from me, the kind that stays exactly as it was, or the kind that changes shape the moment it leaves my hands. Maybe I won’t know until it’s already happened.