traditions

I spent most of Saturday cleaning the house and preparing for the Iranian New Year. I kept thinking of how I had done it last year and the year before, to see if anything had changed.
A conversation with a colleague from Turkey once again made me think about how much these traditions were important to me and for how long I would want to follow them. May be right now I feel I will always want them in my life; but then, it’s only been a few years since I moved here.
My friend thought that I would probably stand by them for as long as I live. What about my children? and their children? Are they going to want to go to the trouble of staying awake till very early in the morning to see the year turn? As much as I hate to admit it I don’t think so. And honestly it would be rather selfish of me to expect them to.
I asked my friend whether he and his friends had any ties to the traditions people followed before the cultural reform introduced by Ataturk . As he spoke to me I understood that it didn’t even matter to him what traditions people were following at that time; it was history. "There are people who study these things at universities" he said. They were now westernized and didn’t want much to do with what their great-grandparents thought.
Like it or not this is more or less how the next generations are going to feel towards what is now an important tradition in my life. Should we try to teach them more about the cultural background they came from? Or is it not our responsibility, or for that matter, not our concern?

On the way back to Vancouver from LA