Bird brain

Traditions are never a hundred percent traditional. And no, that’s not some vague aphorism I found in a fortune cookie.

What I mean is that traditions always have their core elements, plus a bunch of tacked-on personal or family elements that customize them, make them ours. Let’s use Thanksgiving as an example, since most of us are still so crammed with pie we can’t stand up without the aid of household furniture.

Thanksgiving has its own baseline features that are consistent across most families: Turkey, stuffing, orange- and brown-colored side dishes, and that one cousin who gets tanked on Merlot and belts out “White Christmas” during halftime of the Lions game. These are all niceties that go back to the early days, when European pilgrims and Native Americans gathered to feast on hearty food and complain about Detroit’s offensive line.

From there, traditions vary. Maybe your family members dig out the old plastic Christmas tree from the basement and decorate it while their gastrointestinal systems try to make sense of what just happened. Or they break out the Monopoly board and devolve into fisticuffs in a dispute over Park Place. Every home is different.

In Maison Lagasse, Christmas begins as soon as the last drop of beer is drained from its mug. This is due primarily to my mother, who begins her holiday shopping in February and would keep candy canes stocked in her cupboard year-round if it were in any way socially acceptable. Eyelids drooping after a gut-busting gorge, she pops in a favorite yuletide classic -- which for the past several years has been “The Polar Express,” an animated romp that scores points for a Santa Claus who looks like a lumberjack in an L.L. Bean catalogue. My father quaffs Heineken and endures this yearly ritual with relative grace while Mom fights back tears and sings along with the musical numbers in an off-key falsetto. I find myself stuck somewhere between these two extremes, moved by the film’s earnestness but finding myself desperately in want of a clear drink with an olive in it. Sometimes tradition requires endurance. And booze.

Our particular rituals are as comfortable and well-worn as old sweatpants, but to members of another clan our little idiosyncrasies may seem strange. In millions of living rooms across the country, disparate families are up to their own shenanigans. Judging from the stories people have shared online, many of these activities are of the “Aww, how heartwarming” variety, which makes sense because if you’re lucky Thanksgiving is an “Aww, how heartwarming” kind of holiday. (As opposed to Halloween, where the overriding sentiment is “Please, children, don’t leave flaming bags of poop on my front porch.”)

One woman shared her family’s tradition of having a “Thanksgiving tree,” which initially struck me as an unnecessary indoor plant in a season already rife with them. But this is a laminated paper tree; throughout the year, everyone in the family writes down something for which they’re thankful on fall-colored construction paper leaves and puts them in a box. On Turkey Day they tack the leaves up on the Thanksgiving tree and read them aloud. Nice stuff. Another woman said she cooks food based on recipes in her late grandmother’s cookbook, working from handwritten text in her relative’s shaky scrawl. These traditions are so sweet they’re almost sickening, the kind of stuff you see people doing in Lifetime Original Movies with corny titles like “When Caroline Learned to Love Again.”

Not every tradition is quite so saccharine, though. One man, sharing his story on the website pgeveryday.com, said that he and his family have a gun battle every Thanksgiving. They use toy guns, naturally; if they used real ones, each subsequent Thanksgiving would just get lonelier and lonelier, until a day 10 years from now when it’s just one sad man ripping into a turkey in a backwoods motel while evading the cops. His family’s rule, apparently, is that as long as you’re old enough to hold a toy gun, you’re a part of the make-believe melee -- no points, no rules, no winners. Just a bunch of people wagging around plastic Glocks and spraying each other with water while fighting off the encroaching drag of meat-sleep.

Bizarre as that is, there’s one tradition I find even stranger. On danoah.com, one family said that after they’re finished noshing on squash and pie, they all engage in a game of hide-and-seek … with their cars. The gang piles into four or five vehicles, with one car labeled the “it” car, and the rest all seek a quiet place in town where they can park, turn off the lights, and avoid detection; the last undiscovered car then becomes the “it” car, and around they go again. This one gets major props for creativity, but I’m still left wondering what the locals -- not to mention the local police -- think of a bunch of people huddling in cars in the dark in random neighborhoods. Has anyone’s hackles ever been raised? Hopefully these automotive hide-and-seekers don’t live in the same town as the gun-battling family, or else it’s only a matter of time before someone gets a plastic firearm stuck in their face. “Happy Thanksgiving! Now freeze, sucka!”

Goes to show that repetition is all that’s required for something to be a tradition. It can be the goofiest thing in the world, but do it enough times and it’s as ingrained as the natural human instinct to punch a clown.

This year my intent was to start a new Thanksgiving tradition of not eating so much blueberry pie that I temporarily go blind. Can I repeat this year after year? Possibly. But someone may have to hold a plastic gun to my head.