Not-Back-To-School (new tradition)

Julieta Duvall
Sep 5, 2024
2 min read

It feels like just yesterday when I bought our first “1st Day of School” board at Target. It felt awkward 😬 but everyone else was doing it so I thought I should too.

ree — The going back-to-school board picture by Julieta Duvall

Now I know that I didn’t have to.

I have never been much for traditions because life is always evolving. Nature doesn’t stay the same, so why should we? Upholding traditions or letting go of them should be a personal choice.

Even before Unschooling and Deschooling I always questioned some traditions that left me energetically drained for days or completely unsatisfied. I have been expanding on this even more since 2020.

It is now 2024 and we don’t necessarily celebrate not-going-back-to-school day but my husband and I ponder on how different our lives would be if we were still on that journey. I’m grateful that we are not.

Instead, our autumn days are filled with activities initiated by the boys. A good mix of fishing, BBQ, Nerf wars at the park, martial arts and some series on Netflix that we are all watching together. Out of all of them I have been pleasantly surprised with fishing because it's surprisingly calming and I need that.

Which traditions do you have? Are all of them yours or have they been passed down to you? Would you keep them if you were given the choice? All of these questions would come to me at an early age when I would question why I had to do something just because everyone was doing it. My questions never really got answered, so I stopped asking them, until now.

A while back I noticed the book by Vanessa Lachey Life from Scratch: Family Traditions That Start with You and it's exactly like that. I haven't read the book but I sure love the title because it sounds so natural and empowering. You get to decide on the traditions that you want to keep but most importantly you get to decide which ones to let go and start from scratch.