This past weekend, still recovering from our Thanksgiving feast, I participated with my family in our tradition of having Saturday morning breakfast at Einstein Bros. Bagels. We’ve been doing this every week since before my younger sister was born — almost 17 years. We’ve cycled through all the menu and manager changes as time has passed and are familiarized as regulars by the staff.
The way the cashier knows my family’s entire order before I even open my mouth is almost embarrassing, but there is also a certain comfortable familiarity to it. I’m known here and welcome.
Needless to say, my family is a rather habitual lot.
Our routine is always the same: buy a newspaper, order a bagel and some “darn good” coffee and settle in for a good three hours of companionable conversation, crossword puzzles and morning comics.
I feel a certain pride about my family’s loyalty to Einstein’s — or simply “Bagels” as my parents call it — by now.
There have been serious conversations over our bagel table, big laughs and memories that I look back on fondly.
Our particular Einstein’s restaurant is a place where I have practically grown up. I remember when I was too small to easily reach the sink in the tiny bathroom. When I was 10, my classic order was a bagel with jelly, and I would carefully slurp all of the strawberry jam out of the toasted honey wheat bagel’s crevices, feeling rather like an excavator of some ancient, tasty monument.
One rainy Saturday, my family created the plotline of a three-volume mystery book series, which I still need to write down in chapter format and sell — it will make us all famous, I’m sure.
What I’m getting at with all this talk of bagels and shmear is that traditions with family and friends are still important today.
Thanksgiving is a time for big traditions in many families, and the upcoming holiday season even more so. Sure, the holidays are a time when you might have to deal with pressing questions about the future or skeptical raised eyebrows when speaking about your life goals, but it’s also an opportunity to reaffirm the bonds you have with loved ones by taking part in traditions that shaped every one of us into the people we are today.
My family is kind of tradition crazy: We have a practice for everything from watching “101 Dalmatians” every New Year’s to Saturday bagels brunch to singing 10 different versions of “Happy Birthday” every time someone grows another year older. However, I love this about my family. It makes us special. It reminds me how much I appreciate them all.
Traditions are easy to implement, even in college, away from some of the places and people we have grown up with.
Whether it’s getting dinner at a particular restaurant with friends every month, or working out with your gym buddy every week, the habits we form with people close to us are what can make or break our experiences in college and in life.
They can seem like a big pain sometimes — when you have tests to study for, or perhaps when at home this winter break you’d much rather recover from the stress of the semester instead of drag yourself to brunch — but these habits, customs and traditions with people close to us are worth it in the end. These are the things that can help ground the world around us into a little steadfast constancy, especially when it seems like nothing is permanent anymore.
My classes may change, my apartment may change, my life ambitions may change, but I will always have family brunch.
Ten years from now, we could all still be participating in certain traditions that we started as college students. Maybe you will still be attending that monthly dinner with friends — albeit with new faces or in a new setting. Perhaps one sunny Saturday morning I might take my own children out for breakfast bagels.
Sally Greider is a UF English and public relations sophomore. Her columns appear on Tuesdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 12/2/2014]
