“Let's Make it a Tradition”

Extract

If memory serves, the title started as a cliché in undergraduate days. The immediate occasion is of no account: the phrase was likely to spring out when a group of friends met on a date set beforehand, and found the event so enjoyable that they wished to repeat it periodically. Repetition was the essence of what the term meant. Tradition, so conceived, is purposive, the result of an act of will. It is a question, whether a tradition can be willfully created, enacted—whether it issues by deliberate fiat, or whether some involuntary process is involved in producing it.