What Do You Do That Is a Family Tradition?
Silver Napkin Ring
My roommate, while my husband was in Army training for six months, had been married for two years.
I had been married for four-and-a-half months, but we had only been together for two days after our wedding before he left for Boot Camp and two weeks before this phase of training had started.
The first time our husbands were to come home on a weekend pass, she set out candles for dinner.
“When we first married, I decided we would always eat by candlelight,” she told me.
“Sometimes I forget and we don’t have candles until dessert, but I think it is important for a family to have traditions.”
I agreed and set about to figure out what tradition I wanted for our family.
What would feel special, like candlelight dinners?
What would I be willing to do, year in and year out?
Picking A Tradition
I settled on linens at meals.
When I was growing up, we always had paper napkins and ate on plastic placemats on a formica table.
Easy clean-up. Inexpensive.
This may have been why I decided that pure luxury would be to have cloth napkins and tablecloths or cloth placemats for every meal.
Eventually, we bought a wooden dining table that was for family, not just guests.
What About Ironing?
Fortunately for me, cloth technology changed at about the time I was making this decision.
I had embroidered a set of cloth placemats for a wedding trousseau when I was in high school.
I’ve probably used them twice. They have to be ironed.
In comes permanent press.
Even washer and dryer manufacturers conspired to make permanent press clothing work.
Washing machines with permanent press settings keep moisture higher, to reduce wrinkles.
Dryers have a cool-down setting to keep clothes from wrinkling when they sit in the dryer.
Iron manufacturers introduced settings that would not melt the wrinkle-resistant polyester combined with cotton to make permanent press cloth.
History of Permanent Press
While the process for producing cotton that resisted wrinkles goes back to a British inventor, R. S. Willows, for a textile manufacturer in 1932, permanent press clothing, that retained creases while resisting wrinkles, was invented in 1961, by Koret, in California.
It was first used for mens’ and boys’ pants in 1964, by Levi Strauss.
I was married in 1968.
Napkins and tablecloths were soon made out of permanent press cotton.
It took awhile to accumulate enough tablecloth and placemat and napkin sets to go an entire week with fresh linens every day.
A week’s worth of table linens for a family of four only added one washer of clothing to the week and ten minutes to folding clothes.
The Age of Recycling
Now, it’s looking pretty good to have reusable linens for the table, instead of paper.
After more than 40 years, our use of disposables, both in their effect on the environment and the recurring costs, is seen as wasteful and expensive.
35-40% of the waste we put in landfills is paper.
The average American produces 4.4 pounds of waste a day for the landfill, or 1,600 pounds a year.
Or, we could use cloth napkins.
Do you have any family traditions?
Were they part of your family growing up or did you create them?
What traditions have your children or grandchildren continued?
To you and preserving family with traditions.
Carol Covin, Granny-Guru
Author, Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers
5 Comments
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Carol, this is a fascinating article. I decided I want to some day have the tradition of cloth napkins and placemats too. Of course, that may mean returning to the table to eat instead of the TV tray. I enjoyed your background on permanent press fabrics.
I wrote “First Person: Hire People to Fit Your Business Culture and Your Management Style” because businesses too have traditions. I wonder, how many of small businesses owners consciously decided on what traditions to create for their companies like you did for your family?
You can still use cloth napkins on a tray in front of the tv:)
Great insight, John, on how traditions apply to businesses, too. I’ve interviewed more than 500 computer executives for a series of books I did profiling top companies that hire computer professionals. As you suspect, the best companies do have traditions that are part of their culture and an embodiment of the company’s values. Sometimes they chose them to bind employees together, like SAS’s tradition of putting out free bowls of M&M’s for all once a week, or they used them to tell stories about their culture, like the Midwestern company that boasted about their work ethic with the claim that many of their employees milked cows before they came to work. In all cases, company traditions reinforced the choices they made about who they hired, the people they attracted to their doors and the value their products and services brought to their customers.
[...] What do you do that is a family tradition? [...]
Thank you for this additional insight, Carol, I love hearing stories like these. I’m always looking for good examples of companies that have an clear sense of their desired traditions.
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