Holiday Traditions Tug Hard at Our Heartstrings

Biochemistry rules as winter’s chill takes hold: Gray whales migrate; hedgehogs hibernate; bats and squirrels get cryonic, losing nearly half their body weight. Migrant birds, as orderly as Busbee Berkeley dancers, fly in giant Vs as if to say: Chow this way.

Might biochemistry explain why, when the temperature drops, Homo sapiens give fruitcake to people they hate, smooch under mistletoe, stock up on artery-clogging delicacies and drag trees inside the house?

No, say experts who study human behavior. Our switch is an emotional one, trip-wired at the first ‘tis-the-season-of-gluttony signal (in a word: Eggnog). Tradition is the equivalent of a comfort cocoon, an aesthetic universe of familiar smells, sounds and tchotchkes. The sanctioned sport: Overeating.

“Traditions are very comforting,” says Alan Entin, a family psychologist based in Richmond, Va., who adds that traditions have grown increasingly important as technological advances turn life’s constants into obsolete relics.

“You don’t do it often, but you really look forward to it. It’s knowledge that we are not alone and it marks important events. We don’t have to reinvent them. We know we are going to get that special feeling. It’s not even important what something means literally. It’s the emotional meaning that is so powerful.”

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Even powerful enough to influence what one looks for in a house. When Adam Lobel, 36, and his then-five-months-pregnant wife, Leslie, shopped for a house five years ago, he informed her that his only must-have criterion was stairs.

“He had this fantasy where the kids would come down the stairs Christmas morning and see the Christmas tree with all the presents and decorations,” says Leslie Lobel, who did not celebrate Christmas until she married her husband. “And I said, ‘Yeah? Well, what about the other 364 days a year?’ ”

The stairs tradition stuck even though Adam Lobel didn’t move into a two-story house until he was 13. But his descent Christmas morning heightened and prolonged the magic. Where there had been nothing the night before, a festooned noble fir tree would stand, seemingly afloat in a sea of gifts. So it goes for Adam and Leslie Lobel’s own children, Lena, 4, and Sarah, 1.

“Lena goes wild,” says Leslie Lobel, 36. “I always stand at the end of the stairs because I am afraid she is going to do a header into the whole thing. I don’t think it could be more miraculous if baby Jesus were there on the floor.”

Doreen Virtue, a psychotherapist in Newport Beach and author of “The Gift of Giving” (Jormax, 1995), says unstable times pronounce the importance of family tradition. “Stability is what people are craving. There is a real insecurity, primarily financial. No one can count on their job, and we have insecurity about our marriages, about how long we will have our kids and how much longer our parents will be alive.”

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Not just an emotional salve for the psyche, tradition also reconnects us to our roots, provides a fundamental definition of what we believe in and who we are.

“You do the same activities your parents and grandparents have done for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Entin says. “You reinterpret it so it ties you to the past and makes it meaningful for your own current family.”

The Lobels, who are both Jewish, celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah. But like many families, their tradition-bound dining fests are central and are far better when done at home (you get leftovers, complete menu control and no driving is required).

“I don’t want to go to anyone else’s house to eat for Hanukkah because the potato pancakes will be green and hard and lumpy,” grouses Leslie Lobel, who counts among one of her worst Thanksgivings the one where friends did not send guests home with leftovers. “We make a ham with maple and brown sugar for Christmas dinner. Adam is insatiable about that ham. You can find him any time of day or night poised over the leftover ham with a knife.”

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But there is something ironic about getting our knickers in a knot over tradition transgressions, since Americans are nothing if not anti-traditionalist.

“We have far fewer traditions than other societies that came before the Industrial Revolution,” says Elaine Blechman, a professor of psychology at University of Colorado at Boulder. “We are a country known for rebelling.”

Because we are not a tradition-bound country throughout the rest of year, she says, our few traditions become sacrosanct, preserved with a zealous fervor. (You will string those cranberries and popcorn or Santa won’t bring you any presents.)

“Tradition even tells us how to deal with strangers when they come to the door,” Blechman says.

Yes. If there is mistletoe hanging above it, you plant one on them. Depending on the kissee, this can be either good or bad. For the bad, beg off with an emerging fever blister.

But why fruitcake? Who eats it and who is emotionally moved by it? Who cares that domestic engineering dominatrix Martha Stewart (the reason for millions of women’s failure complexes) has a recipe for it?

The ubiquitousness of fruitcake is proof of how we blindly adhere to tradition whether it makes sense or not. In the spirit of rebellion, I’m donating every fruitcake that comes my way this year to those poor little animals who lose all those pounds hibernating.