Traditions

Friday February 14, 2025

Happy Valentine’s Day to your butt.

Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate. In my household, Valentine’s Day is one of the few holidays for which we have a tradition. So, while you thought I’d zig and write about Love, here I am zagging with Traditions.

Neither my family nor Lindsay’s has much in the way of traditions. In moments, this has caused me angst, like when I hear about Matt Vittorio’s massive annual family trip to the Jersey Shore or Kerry Milazzo’s Patriots tailgates.

Why doesn’t my family have any fun traditions with other families or even our own? We used to go to Virginia for Christmas every year when we were kids; we had a decent run of Thanksgivings and summer “Camp Pagoses” at my aunt and uncle’s house in Eastham, but nothing has really stuck. It gets harder when you get older. Your responsibilities grow inversely to your energy levels, the flesh wounds of reunions past fester longer and scar slower, and the excuses come more easily.

I ask you: How does anybody maintain a tradition? For Lindsay and me, at least, the secret appears to be red meat.

We have precisely two traditions. On our birthdays, we go to a steakhouse. On Valentine’s Day, we cook a burger out of the Bob’s Burgers Cookbook, which Abby Albright and Brandon Boyd gifted to us six years ago.

If you haven’t seen Bob’s Burgers, it’s cute. It’s about Bob Belcher, a burger restaurateur and his wife and three children who “help” him run the restaurant. It’s adult animation, so time never passes, it’s unclear where and when things take place, and there are virtually no stakes, as every character gets into some hijinks without real consequences. The show is relentlessly punny and schticky, to the point that we’ve gotten a bit tired of it by Season 15, but it’s the first show we ever watched together, so it’s got a special place.

This year, we’re choosing between four burgers in the cookbook, and we want you to help us decide what to make tonight:

As you can see, each burger has a punny name that hints at the special ingredients. It’s up to you to decide which sounds best!

Tell me about your traditions in the comments or by reaching out. I want to know, and I want to know how the hell you keep them traditions because I did this golf trip with my high school friends last year that I want to make an annual thing…

One Hollywood: Bob’s Burgers, Hulu

It’s a shoo-in this Friday. We’re gonna watch an episode tonight.

One Song: Tradition - “Fiddler on the Roof”

I mean, come on. Talk about low hanging fruit. I don’t remember who played Tevye in my high school production of “Fiddler” (I think it was Grant Ryan), but I do remember Nathan Wallace being shoehorned into the one and only drama show he’d ever be in to play the reclusive Fiddler simply because he was a damned wizard on the violin. Zero dialogue, barely any blocking; they just told him to listen for a cue and go fiddle across the stage for a few seconds. He was a natural.

One Book: August Wilson’s Century Cycle

I struggled with One Book this week. There aren’t too many books you read as part of a tradition. I almost said the Bible, but nobody seems to agree on what that thing is about, so it sort of defeats the purpose of all the traditions it engenders. I’ve also never read the thing.

I considered some books about writing or creativity since they virtually all say to create, create, create, create to get all the bad shit out until you get to the good stuff lurking beneath. That’s a form of masochistic tradition, isn’t it?

Ultimately, I landed on ten plays, which makes no sense under the heading “One Book,” but I make the rules.

Between 1982 and 2005, August Wilson wrote ten plays, each telling a story emblematic of Black life in a different decade of the 20th century. Every play is good, and a few (Fences, Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars imo) are magnificent.

At the center of each play is a constant tension between tradition and modernity as Black Americans step slowly away from slavery and into a “free” nation despite the institution’s legacy hampering their progress in macrocosmic and personal ways. There’s a tension between generations that pervades throughout the Century Cycle as characters attempt to reconcile what concepts like ancestral tradition, family, individuality, success, progress, and freedom all mean in a country that their forebears were brought to in chains.

One Game: Bite the Bag

Okay, so let’s bring the mood back a bit. (White privilege at work, baby!) That one Thanksgiving we spent at my mom’s friend Leslie’s house in Vermont, we played Bite the Bag. The purpose of this game is in the name. But there’s a twist!

You must stand on one foot to bite the brown paper grocery bag. If you lose your balance, you’re out. Everyone takes turns attempting to bite the bag, and those who succeed advance to the next round, whereupon an inch is cut from the top of the bag. Repeat. Cut an inch. Repeat, and so on.

Leslie’s daughter, Claire, kicked the absolute shit out of the rest of us that year. About a decade later, I introduced it at a Friendsgiving in Marina del Rey, where alcohol both raised the difficulty considerably and the raucousness when anybody succeeded. I think Emma Haberlach won, but I can’t remember?

One Food: Sit and Spinach Burger

Yeah so I lied. We already chose a burger, but I hope you enjoyed registering an opinion and learned a valuable lesson that opinions are always either right or wrong, depending on who you ask. There is no think.

This one has spinach cooked in red wine vinegar, garlic, and mozzarella. I think it’s gonna be pretty good.

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.