This past Christmas my grandmother, mother, and I were all sitting around the dining room table. I had just dropped my sister off at a friend’s house and my hands were wrapped around my third glass of wine, which would hopefully help me endure whatever conversation would take place. Three generations and three distinct personalities, just us, sitting together at a table for the first time since … well, I don’t remember. It is tempting to say that my mother and I are at opposite ends of the personality specturm with my grandmother (I still call her Nana), a diplomatic pacifist, in the middle. But then of course, there is no personality spectrum and we probably have just as much in common as we do apart.

I think my mom made some warm, fuzzy, and fake comment about how nice it was for us to all be together for Christmas and how the day couldn’t have possibly turned out any better. Of course I, the childish, cynical Grinch, had to interject with how much I hate Christmas, the consumerism, the Christian hypocrisy, the dysfunctional families, yada, yada, yada. Then my grandmother, the ever wise diplomat who left this comment about the pagan origins of Navidad, steers the conversation to the more peaceful and abstract topic of: isn’t ritual an important and necessary part of every culture?

My mother made the I am Margaret Mead gesture as she tried to think of a clever response which would both affirm her thoughts on Christmas and subtly congratulate her effort to save the world’s children. But I am younger and quicker and I snapped “no, all rituals are stupid.” I then stuck out my tongue and blew wet paper wads out of a straw at my progenitors.

Sagacious Nana, however, draws me back to reality and reminds me that rituals are shared experiences we can all relate to, even if it is in our mutual antipathy. They bring together groups which may be as small as a singular family or may transcend nationality and culture such as Christmas and New Years or even the World Cup. And they do so with an important disregard to current events. In the back of my head I was reminded of the famous – and probably romanticized – account of opposing sides of World War II coming together to share rations and cigarettes on Christmas Eve only to continue slaughtering each other the next morning.

But of course I wouldn’t give any ground. “No, no. Rituals are stupid. I am one for sponteneity. All pleasure derives from sponteneity. Ritual is just one more entry into your planner, one more thing to remember, more weight, more guilt when you don’t buy a gift, and more hard feelings when you don’t receive one. Ritual is expectation, nothing more, and it is guaranteed to bring disappointment.”

Damn, that sounded pretty good I thought to myself. My mom agreed that she could relate. (Haha, victory, na na na na na na) But she said that ritual is still an important part of her life, even at an individual, daily level. “I have my own little rituals that I do myself every single day,” she said.

And I was reminded of my own daily rituals. Starting my day with a run. Filling my coffee mug – the same frickin coffee mug every day – nearly to the top with double French roast, a little half and half, and one sugar in the raw, sitting down, crossing my legs like a Democratic girlie man, letting out a happy sigh, and then unfolding the New York Times. Or listening to music every night before I go to sleep.

But of course I said none of this. “I completely disagree,” I said. “I can’t stand such robotic routines and I try to do everything I can to act on pure sponteneity, to listen to my inner voice and not habitual auto-pilot. It’s kinda like Zen: you’ve got to be aware of every situation, every circumstance, including your mood and behavior, and make decisions accordingly.” This seemed to impress my mother. She said I was right, that she had gone living all of her life based upon some society-imposed notion (not true) of you have to be here at 10 a.m. and there by noon. My grandmother, however, reminded me ever so sweetly that I was lying out of my teeth and that we all have our responsibilities and commitments which require punctuality and compromise.

This is true. There is the work. There are the ill-timed birthday parties and scheduled dates and bon voyage parties. There are those people who will not let you leave without scheduling the next time you will see each other and they will scream at you as you walk towards your car: “you better not flake!” There is all of this. We cannot escape it, Zen Buddhists we are or not.

Our conversation continued on late into the night and it did so peacefully and without the dysfunctional characteristics of guilt and blame which always seem to be a part of families and religions. We pretended to dissect our personality differences though in truth we barely scratched the surface. We talked about the differences between communalism and individualism, privacy and transparency, and the gestures which define so much of who we are. There were times when my mother would say something that seemed as Off The Wall as Michael Jackson, but then my grandmother would tie it back into the conversation and I realized that her knowledge of the world and of humans is still much more expansive and peripheral than my own.

Huh, I don’t know how I got here. What I meant to write is simply that rituals of other cultures tend to bother me far less than those of our own and that I translated an article about La Rosca De Reyes on San Diego Blog. But you never know where the keyboard will take you. So quickly: La Rosca de Reyes is a Mexican pastry baked for El D&iaacute;a de los Reyes Magos on Jan. 6th, which is during a month from mid-December to mid-January which many Mexicans affectionately call the period to eat and drink yourself into a coma of contentness to last you through the rest of the shitty work year. Last year on the 6th of January Laura and I were in Zacatecas, Mexico were they were supposedly baking the largest Rosca de Reyes ever. (it spanned more than a block) If there is a Mexican bakery, digo, una panaderia, in your neighborhood, you should definitely stop by on the 6th and pick yourself up a rosca. Just be careful not to chip a tooth on one of the plastic figurines baked into the sweet bread.