I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this previously, but it occurred to me yet again today how very much I appreciate one aspect – at least! – of being an adult: the ability to create one’s own traditions, and to develop one’s own routines and rhythms to support both those traditions and one’s ordinary, everyday life.  When I was little, my parents were not big on routine, nor on tradition, I realise. We had very few things that happened routinely, and fewer things to which we returned each year, say, or each season; this, perhaps, explains why I find such things so comforting. We never went grocery-shopping routinely (and indeed both parents seemed slightly scornful of such a concept), meaning we often had last-minute dashes out for dinner ingredients;* more routine, if one can call them that, were the spontaneous day-trips of three-hundred-mile roundtrips, which normally started at ten in the morning, meaning late arrivals and even later returns home. My parents spent a lot of my childhood playing for folk dances, which meant I spent many evenings half-asleep behind stage curtains, or curled up in the back of the car, quilt spread between amplifier kit and a stray violin case; Morris men late on summer evenings, chucking those mysterious sticky-things about the place in a vaguely sinister manner, ploughmen’s dinners, drafty tents and midges circling half-empty pints of cider – all things I associate with life before the age of, say, ten. My father enjoyed being centre-stage – he still does, though he does less playing of this variety now, preferring orchestral stuff – and being out preceding one’s reputation doesn’t really sit well with a shopping list and a meal rota. My mother’s part in this chaotic existence was largely determined by the fact that I just don’t think she was very interested in having established patterns of existence. She longed for them, in some ways, I think – the security of knowing what will happen and when – but just couldn’t quite summon up the enthusiasm needed to turn ideas into reality. When she and I lived on our own after the aged parent moved to London to live with his then-girlfriend, my mother was a different woman – much tidier, much more organised. I wonder now who was the chaos-perpetrator, and I think it was probably my father, though to my knowledge she never made a conscious decision to step away from that.

Aaaaanyway, the point is that I think the reason I love order, and rhythm, so much, is that I experienced very little of it as a child. Now, I ground myself through the patterns which shape our lives. Quercus, the witchling and I start each morning curled up in our big bed in a largely dark room, hiding, feeding (in the witchling’s case), and generally waking up as slowly as possible. We finish each day with stories, the quiet dark of lamplight, and a bevy of kisses, as this is the witchling’s current fascination. Our days follow the same pattern, awash with constantly evolving patterns reassuring at once in their adaptability and their reliability. In the ten years we have been together, Quercus and I have evolved seasonal patterns too – Christmas, for example, now includes a cake made with dark chocolate, fruit and spices, a tree which arrives on the solstice, and Pfeffernüsse. We have non-chocolate-related calendars, homemade stockings, and far too many satsumas. Homemade puddings and mincemeat biscuits, this year mashed into submission by the witchling’s tiny fists. A real tree, and fircones, biscuits and felted hearts and stars to go on it.

It’s so, so, so nice to be the person who decides when and how we do these things. Not to have to wait and hope and wonder if things will work out the way you’d like, but to take charge and make it so. (I can never say that without thinking of that chap in Star Trek.) Part of me appreciates the notion that the witchling, as a very small person, seems to thrive on the gentle repetition of our daily lives, but part of me is aware that she is not the only one. At the moment, it seems that the spontaneity I experienced as a child was enough to be going on with; the routines we have evolved seem to support me every bit as much as they do my child. Does this mean she’ll be a thrill-seeking travel addict, I wonder? Is it as simple as a step away from what one experiences in one’s own childhood? Probably not, given that Quercus’s early childhood was pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum – he can’t remember a week where no shopping was planned, nor a journey made without preparation – yet he too thrives on the existence of certain rhythms.

And you? Do you do things differently each day, each week, each year? Do the traditions of your childhood reassure or restrict you? Do tell. I am all agog. (Can one be partially agog, I wonder?)

*Ironically, this lack of routine is now such a well-established thing in relation to the aged parent that one can almost call it a tradition.