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The final few weeks of the year, from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, offer multiple opportunities to observe and participate in long-established traditions. Most families undertake their own particular rituals or customs — whether it’s opening one gift on Christmas Eve, baking sugar cookies, or gathering around the hearth for a reading from “A Christmas Carol” — without giving much thought to the matter.

But even traditions seemingly as trivial as these are anything but. Typically, the practitioner of a certain ritual, when asked to explain its meaning, simply states with finality, “It’s a tradition.” For most of us, the explanation is sufficient, and we inquire no further.

But perhaps we should. The very term “tradition” implies solemnity and reverence, doesn’t it? There is something ethereal, transcendent and magical about tradition that distinguishes it from mere habit. Tradition is an intangible concept with a concrete impact. Most of us seem to grasp this intuitively.   

Our friends at Webster’s define tradition as “the handing down of legends, customs, etc., from generation to generation, esp. by word of mouth.” A more profound definition comes from the late Russell Kirk, who defended tradition as “a custom handed down from one age to another, acquiring by prescription almost the force of law” (my italics).

This does not mean that those who abandon a particular tradition will be arrested; it means most of us feel duty-bound to carry out rituals long-established. It is an obligation that we happily fulfill. In fact, to some of us, the thought of discontinuing a tradition is an assault on the conscience. But why is this so?

Some insight may be gained from the magisterial scribbling of English author G.K. Chesterton. Tradition, he believed, “may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.” 

Likewise, British statesman and author Edmund Burke often wrote and spoke about “the eternal contract” that links the dead, the living and those yet to be born. Tradition, one might say, is the means by which one generation communicates with the next. 

Burke, Kirk wrote, illuminated “the necessity to any high and just civilization of a conscious belief in the value of continuity” in “religious and ethical conviction, literature and schooling, political and economic affairs, and in the physical fabric of life.”

Burke warned us of a time when men are ignorant of tradition: “Once most men should forget the principle of continuity, once they should break the eternal contract, they would be thrown on the meager resources of private judgment.”

This is why most of us are so dedicated to tradition. It is, we believe, a communion with preceding generations — a reverent embrace of ancestors long passed. Traditions comfort us with a sense of continuity and permanence — a bulwark against sudden change and “progress.”

Hence, our hostility toward “community trees,” schools that adjourn for “Winter Break,” and sales clerks who wish us “Happy holidays.” They make their presence felt at this time every year: the do-gooders and busy-bodies who disrespect us (the majority) and our traditions in order to appease, pander and avoid giving offense to hypersensitive, ACLU-coddled minorities.

The do-gooder is typically denounced as merely “politically correct,” but that term is too generous. Because tradition is a communion with generations passed, the do-gooder is a heretic (“anyone who does not conform to an established view, doctrine, etc.”). Calling a Christmas tree a “community tree” is worse than political correctness; it borders on sacrilege (“violation or profanation of something sacred”). The Christmas tree itself is not sacred, of course, but it represents a celebration that is.

It has become fashionable in certain quarters to denounce and mock those of us who “overreact” to politically correct offenses against Christmas. But we perceive such actions as disrespectful toward tradition — which means they are disrespectful toward our ancestors. The heretic undermines our sense of continuity — what Burke considered a “necessity to any high and just civilization.”

Let us not submit to “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Our traditions are our lineage and our heritage, and we should cling to them just as we cling to our guns and our religion.

Charles Davenport Jr. (cdavenportjr@hotmail.com) writes on the first and third Sundays of each month.