Have you ever heard the story about a mother teaching her daughter how to make the traditional family roast?

It’s the holidays and they’re spending some mother-daughter bonding time together making dinner.  They’re cooking the family’s traditional roast, a recipe that they’ve been making every Christmas season for years and years.  Things are moving along smoothly until the mother instructs her daughter to cut the ends off of the roast before putting it into the pan.

“Why do we cut the ends off?” asks the daughter, quite reasonably.

Caught off guard, the mother realizes she has no idea why; it’s something her mother always did, so she always followed suit.  Curious, the two of them decide to call the grandmother for the answer.  When asked about chopping the ends off of the roast, the grandmother replies:

“You know, I don’t know.  It’s something my mother always did, so I always did too.”

So the mother and daughter decide to call the great-grandmother.  When asked about chopping the ends off of the roast, the great-grandmother replies:

“Oh, that’s because I never had a big enough pan.  I chopped off the ends so I could fit the whole roast into the pan at once.”

So something that the family had assumed was such an integral part of their family tradition turned out to be born of necessity, not really having anything to do with the process at all (I’m sure the roast tasted just as good with the ends attached).  Kind of neat, eh?

I wanted to share a similar story about my family; not as dramatic, but still an interesting surprise when I found out about it.

My grandmother bakes Hungarian cookies called “kifli” every year for Christmas; I don’t remember a holiday season without them.  They’re finger-sized rolls of cream cheese dough wrapped around sweet chopped nut filling, and are WAY delicious.  Typically they have powdered sugar sprinkled on top.  Did I say delicious?  Okay, good.

After years of eating these cookies without questioning it, my brother and I eventually got curious about where kifli came from and did some good old fashioned Googling to learn more.  Reading Wikipedia we found that yep – kifli look basically the same online as they do when they’re on a dish in our Grandmother’s house, with one exception – many/most of the pictures online showed the cookies as a crescent, not straight.

This wasn’t exactly a vital difference or anything; the cookies still tasted delicious, but we were curious why the “traditional” kifli were crescent shaped and ours were always straight.  Eventually we asked our Grandmother about this.

Apparently when my father was in seminary school (before deciding to not become a priest, obviously) my Grandma would send him and his buddies care packages filled with cookies, including kifli.  She would pack all the cookies in a shoebox – and straight cookies are much easier to stack and pack then crescent ones.

That’s it; that’s the only reason we ever had straight kifli instead of crescent ones.  I always thought it was cool that something I’d taken for granted as tradition was done decades ago just to make packing cookies easier for our Grandmother.  And I’ll probably never make them in a crescent myself…just because that’s what’s become tradition for me.

Does your family have any traditions born of necessity?