This past Halloween, our bucket was stolen. Just using the word – bucket – it wouldn’t seem like it would be a treasured object of priceless value. Bucket. It isn’t even a nice-sounding word. And if it was just a bucket, it wouldn’t be anything valuable. Unfortunately, the inexpensive and not at all unique bucket that was only used once a year to collect candy was full of sentimental memories and hopes for future Halloweens – a lot to put on a bucket, I know, but nonetheless, it was a very important bucket. It was this bucket that was stolen and with it went my projected hopes of future traditions because, especially when you are overseas, take my word for it, traditions matter.
Our first child, our daughter, was born in October and as a fundraiser the school was selling Halloween buckets that year. Knowing quite well that our 24-day-old couldn’t possibly be trick-or-treating that year we bought the bucket as a symbol of Halloweens to come. In what would now be our first “photo shoot” we walked around our school that has a flair for overdoing Halloween decor – and took pictures of our Little Little in the bucket.
The following year, Husband and I laughed about how funny it would be to put her in the bucket again, to see how much she had changed and how much she had grown. In typical parent form, we set her up in a photo that would make us laugh today and would inevitably – one day – embarrass her. A tradition was born and by the time the third Halloween rolled around, putting her in the bucket was a part of our family culture – made even more special with her new baby brother to shove in the bucket too.
This was our first tradition as a family.
This Halloween, my 2-year-old put down the bucket and walked away because she’s 2-year-old and that’s what 2-year-olds do. Someone else (an adult who I later confronted and lied) picked up the bucket and walked away. It should go without saying that this expat mother was destroyed.
Heartbroken, I remembered back to our first Halloween when the bucket was a symbol for the future and now here it was – future Halloween – and there was no bucket. I took pictures of my daughter’s first experience trick-or-treating with a white plastic bag from a local supermarket. I know what she collected her candy in shouldn’t have mattered as much as her excitement of holding out a bag and getting free candy but it did. And to add salt to my wound, I knew that our yearly picture of babies in buckets would end here.
Traditions seem like the antithesis of living abroad. How can you create customs that will be a part of your family’s story when you are never in one place for much time; when you move from place to place to new place every couple of years? How can you create rituals when nothing stays the same?
But it is specifically because of those questions that rituals and customs are so imperative to the expat life. These rituals are what keep you grounded when the walls around you shift. They are what keeps you on solid ground when all else changes.
Psychiatrist Steven J. Wolin and anthropologist Linda Bennett had this to say of family rituals:
Family traditions are specific to each family. They don’t come with “rules” imposed by the larger culture, so it’s up to the family to decide how each one is marked. This personalization makes traditions more meaningful, because it lets the family fully express who they are and what they believe in.
Tradition can be born out of an expectation (I expect to eat yams every Thanksgiving or I know we have Christmas Eve at my family’s home every year), but to the expat living abroad, tradition is born out of necessity. You need something that stays the same because your walls, your surroundings, your food, your people, will not. Everything changes. The only constant are the traditions you choose to make constant. These are the things you pack up and take with you no matter where you call home for the next few years. And for expat kids it is all the more important. Traditions help to anchor children and keep them feeling a sense of family and togetherness and consistency.
We can’t give our kids some of the most basic traditions we grew up with because it’s unreasonable to ask for a White Christmas in 85 degrees and impossible to carve a pumpkin when you can’t find a pumpkin. The closest my children have come to carving a pumpkin was the one their grandfather carved and sent via email (which owned its own sadness for Husband and I since traditionally our kids would have carved that pumpkin with Pop Pop themselves – but that’s a whole different story).
And maybe that’s it – the reason expats cling so desperately to Halloween tin buckets. We have to hold tightly to traditions we make to replace all the other ones we have had to give up. We create new ones that never existed to take the place of our childhood ones we left behind.
The problem wasn’t that this guy stole that bucket, it was that with it, he stole the first tradition we ever made as a family. I hope you love that bucket as much as I did, Bucket Thief, because if we ever meet again, you’ll question if it was worth it.
Sincerely,
The Mouse