2025, Family, Food, Kids, Uncategorized

Tradition!

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I wrote on Wednesday about getting moose meat from our next door neighbor, a moose his brother-in-law had shot last year. The reason for the gift of moose was to make room in their freezer for the venison from a deer that Neighbor’s 12 year old daughter shot over the weekend.

Neighbor comes from an extended family for whom hunting is really important. Last Saturday he and his daughter drove to the sparsely inhabited grasslands south southwest of us, and she got her deer. It wasn’t a clean shot, and they had to chase it. It took a while for the deer to expire. They gutted it out, and loaded it in the truck. On the way back, the girl told her dad she didn’t want to go hunting anymore.

Neighbor spoke proudly of how courageous his daughter was for telling him how she felt about an activity so important in their family, and how he was supportive of her decision. He said they had great conversations on the way there and back about all sorts of things like boys, her plans for the future, etc. He is a good dad, an educator, who spent are least one summer in San Francicso coaching swimming for Stanford. His daughter is a lucky girl.

What family traditions have you kept or dropped? What qualities do you think make for a good father?

28 thoughts on “Tradition!”

  1. Cynthia Bucket, also known as Dame Patricia Routledge, has died at the age of 96. Another painful loss after a long and rewarding life. May she rest easy.

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  2. What does spending at least one summer coaching swimming at Stanford have to do with being a dad, good or otherwise? What does it have to do with anything?

    Personally, I would suspend judgement about anyone feeling the need to tell me, in so many words, what a good dad he is.

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  3. If we had any traditions in my family, they escaped me. Because of mom’s unpredictability and mental health issues, pretty much everything we did as kids meant seizing the moment of opportunity. If she was in a foul mood, no matter how much it had been planned, it didn’t happen.

    Because of dad’s long absences, his parenting took place in two or three week spurts between voyages until I was fifteen years old.

    He was a great dad to little kids: playful, loving, fun, patient and encouraging. I’m grateful for the many things I learned from him when I was little.

    Unfortunately, he didn’t have a clue how to deal with teenagers. He was very authoritarian, not very receptive to new ideas, and had no tolerance for opinions that didn’t square with his. Ironically, my feminist adult self is deeply rooted in the confidence in myself that he had nurtured when I was a small child.

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  4. Kudos to him for not just saying something like “You’ve got to toughen up – this is our family tradition and you’re gonna keep it going…” He listened to her, and that’s one of the things that makes a good father – or just a good person.

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        3. It has nothing to do with my mood. The story as related in the original post sends up all sorts of red flags for me and I’m surprised I’m the only one.

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  5. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Positive traditions in my family are about education, teaching, and young women. My paternal grandmother graduated high school then attended “Normal School” where she was certified to be a country school teacher. She then taught from the years 1917-1921 when she married. She was the first to do anything like this. My other grandmother tried to go to high school. I talked with her a long time about this part of her life. She attended country school through 8th grade, where she met my grandfather. Then she attended high school “in town” which was very significant to her. (It was so large and so intimidating that she could not adjust to all the people.) There were less than 50 other kids in her class, but she had never seen so many people. She also had to stay with a relative in town, and that was hard, too, so she quit, regretted it always and insisted that her daughters go to high school. Her youngest three daughters attended college for 2 years. Grandma loaned them the money to attend.

    Both Grandmothers were very smart and good farm business women, nurturing their chicken flocks and egg businesses, as well as being masterful cooks and food managers. My paternal grandmother was also known for her “readings”–oral interpretations of essays and poetry which she read at formal and informal social gatherings. My sister is so much like her. Both grandfathers had 8th grade educations because their labor was needed on farms. They were excellent, productive farmers and good businessmen as farmers. But my grandparents sent my father to college.

    So my sister and I were educated, without any question about whether girls should be educated. Everyone in the family, male or female, has college degrees, with the exception of my son, who followed the tech pattern of almost finished, but becoming employed in the tech world without one because he could manage computer codes. My brother, who a teacher said was not college material, became a teacher, has 2 masters degrees (education and history) and married a doctor.

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  6. Because he was such an athlete, family was concerned that my dad would be disappointed when I was born that I was a girl. This was in the days before women’s sports in public schools. “Jake didn’t get his baseball boy” my grandmother said on several occasions that I remember, and she always added “but he didn’t care”. He always supported my decisions and aspirations.

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  8. Good for her telling what she feels, and good for him accepting.
    When I sold the milk cows, I really felt like I was letting go of 4 generations of dairy cattle on the farm. That was hard to accept. I still feel a little bad about that part.

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