Thought this was particularly appropriate given the upcoming holidays, and my particular situation today.
I am VERY family-oriented. Tradition is very important to me. Just to give you an idea, my mother gave me a quilt that my grandmother had sewn when she was 10 with all her friends and cousins (a friendship quilt) and I cried for a good 15 minutes with how connected I felt to previous generations. Just recently, my mom showed me my grandmother's old cookbook - all hand-glued recipes from magazines, or the best kind, note cards filled with her handwriting and taped in place describing different christmas cookie recipes, with the years she made them written in pencil in the margin. I was so moved, I can't even explain it.
So to me, family traditions are very important. Problem is, SO MANY of them are food based, and not based around healthy foods, either! Now a lot of them are workable - I will never skip my grandfather's home-cooked Christmas breakfast, for example, and it isn't a big deal. But the problem is, there are TONS of traditions, and all of them are important to me, and I don't know how to execute all of them without ruining my plan.
This is coming up today because on Halloween, my mom and I (and she with her mom before) made doughnuts, from scratch, every year, and ate them with hot mulled apple cider. I feel like I'm missing out if I don't have my homemade doughnut! If Halloween is on a weekend, I go home - make the doughnuts, eat one, and leave her with the leftovers! But I'm not making them this year at home, and I'm feeling sad about leaving the tradition to another year. But I know that if I make doughnuts, I'm going to eat them (and the associated tubs of frosting) to a point where I won't be happy with myself.
Anyone else deal with this? What are your food-based traditions? Which ones do you keep, which ones do you skip, and how do you handle it?