How has ritual and ceremony played a role in my life?

Many years ago when I thought of the word ritual, I thought of the church. I was raised Roman Catholic and attended parochial school so religious rituals were part of every school day. As a young mother, I had no idea that my husband and I were creating family rituals/traditions by the way we embraced and celebrated holidays. It was brought home to me quite forcefully by my daughter several years ago when she was home from college for Thanksgiving. She was dating a young man who asked her to join his family for the Thanksgiving holiday in another city about 5 hours away. She would drive there on Wednesday night and return home on Saturday morning. We would have our Thanksgiving Dinner gathering on that Saturday about 2 p.m. We had always been flexible about the actual date of holiday gatherings so everyone could be present. Other family members agreed to the plan so I was extremely surprised to see her little Chevette tooling down the driveway to our home on the Friday afternoon instead of Saturday morning. She burst in the front door and before I could express my concern about her returning a day early, she said Mama, “They didn’t start cooking the Turkey yesterday until almost noon; they used stove top stuffing mix; there were no homemade pies; they used canned yams. She was truly upset. It was then that I realized how deeply my every day actions and attitudes as a parent impacted my children. This morning, I looked up the word ritual and this is a series of definitions I found: “established formal behavior, performance of formal acts, system of rites, unchanging pattern” and last but not least in my way of thinking there was a biological definition: “a set form of communication involving a sequence of actions that an animal uses to communicate information or reinforce social cohesion.” This made me think of today’s quote: “We must continually choose love in order to nourish our souls and drive away fear, just as we eat to nourish our bodies and drive away hunger.” Let us continually choose love. That’s an evolutionary ritual worth cultivating.