Breaking a tradition is hard but making a new one can be incredibly fun. When I moved from Northern Virginia to Boston to attend college five years ago, I had a whole new daily life to adjust to, one that excluded some of my favorite traditions: attending the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., celebrating Día de los Muertos at my grandmother's house, eating the excess inventory that my mami had baked ahead of our annual cookie party. I adapted the essence of these traditions into my new life by forming new ones (though in most cases, overcoming social anxiety was a far bigger obstacle for me than scheduling conflicts); some I celebrated privately, others with my roommates, but the ones that provided me the most comfort were the ones I shared with my Massachusetts grandparents.

My father’s parents, Norm and Eileen, live on the South Shore, an hour away from the city (if you’re lucky). During my time in Boston, I could rely on them when I needed comfort, shelter, transportation, storage space, and, of course, new traditions. These mostly involved dinners: birthday dinners for my younger cousin and myself, post-holiday dinners the night before dorms reopened, Easter dinners with whichever family members and friends were in town. I would fill them in on how the rest of my family was doing, groan over terrible highway traffic with my grandfather, and swear to text my grandmother as soon as I was back in my room (which I almost always remembered…eventually). Most of our traditions took place in Marshfield or Boston, but the Concord Museum’s Family Trees was the first event that brought us all away from our respective homes and let us experience something new as a trio.

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Over a decade ago, my mami and I read Heather Vogel Frederick’s The Mother-Daughter Book Club series together (though not simultaneously: finding free time to read was easier for a sixth grader than for a mother of four). The cozy  middle-grade books follow an extended community based in Concord, Massachusetts, and the classic books that they read together. Buried in the fifth entry, Home for the Holidays, was a brief reference to the museum’s Family Trees exhibit:

Family Trees is a big fund-raiser for the museum, and one of Concord’s most popular holiday traditions. Each tree — and there are a couple dozen of them of all shapes and sizes on display inside the museum — is decorated to represent a different children’s book, which is featured beside it. It’s really cool, and every year the lineup changes. The last time I went, they had some of my old favorites like A Little Princess and The Borrowers and The Cat in the Hat, along with new books I’d never heard of but ended up wanting to read after seeing the trees. One of my favorites was Betty Crocker’s Junior Cookbook for Boys and Girls, because the tree was decorated with miniature cooking tools like rolling pins and pie plates and things, along with small measuring cups and teaspoons and tiny fake food. 

I was eleven when I first read this passage and could have swooned at the idea of an annual exhibit that combined two of my favorite things: children’s books and Christmas tree ornaments. (I waited for the Hallmark Dream Book like some wait for the September issue of Vogue.) My family and I rarely visited Massachusetts between the Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day window in which Family Trees is held, so there was no way of experiencing it beyond a few older images on Google. And once I moved to Boston, the opportunity continued to elude me: I was so overwhelmed with finals at the end of my first semester freshman year  that I had no time to attempt to navigate the commuter rail out to Concord, and my sophomore year took place amid (thankfully) stern COVID restrictions that relegated me to Virginia through the winter holidays.

I was still wearing my mami’s hand-sewn masks junior year but had begun venturing back to city-sponsored fairs and markets, gardens and museums, movies and live theater. My renewed interest in Boston and beyond — sharpened by a lot, and I mean a lot, of long walks from one end of the city to another to vary my quarantined days the year prior — meant that the idea of Family Trees came back to me while planning my final weeks of the semester. I figured it could be a nice addition to my post–Thanksgiving break visit with my grandparents. I extended the invitation to my grandmother, and we made our plan.

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The Family Trees begin as soon as you walk in the front door of the Concord Museum. You can gauge whether you will enjoy the rest of exhibit based on your first impression of the tree to the left of the front desk: does, say, a synthetic Christmas tree decorated with marshmallow garlands, felt mittens, and tongue depressor-snowmen, representing Grace Lin’s The Last Marshmallow, delight or at least intrigue you? Then venture forth. If you are unmoved, enjoy the gift shop, then move along. (Or go ahead and check out the rest of the museum, which houses plenty of storied artifacts not related to children’s books or Christmas trees.)

My grandparents and I were the former case, thankfully; my grandmother had her camera out within seconds. My grandfather is a longtime government teacher who only recently managed to commit to retirement, and my grandmother now brings her secretarial meticulousness to designing greeting cards. The three of us — educator, artist, publishing student who occasionally read Edelweiss catalogs for fun — had different lenses through which to appreciate the artistry on display, but we had an equally good time drifting from room to room, re-angling our museum maps when we couldn’t find our way from Brooke Hall to the Poetry Passageway, swarming each new tree or wreath in our path, stepping back to get the full picture, wandering the circumference, leaning forward to photograph minute details.

We laughed in astonishment over the creativity and effort that went into redefining what a tree or a wreath can be: the wreath for a Knight Owl display was a giant pizza into which a scaly green dragon gnawed a hole; for Yayoi Kusama Covered Everything in Dots and Wasn’t Sorry., the tree was Yayoi Kusama, from her iconic red bob down to her polka-dotted dress.

We tried to identify materials used: paper clips, sticky notes, and yellow legal paper folded into hearts, chains, and tiny paper airplanes for the Off-Limits wreath; a litany of recycled items repurposed for ornaments portraying the ocean life Over and Under the Waves (fish with bottle cap fins and jellyfish tentacles made from newspaper plastic bags); tree skirts made from world maps for The Boy Who Loved Maps or envelopes addressed to Emerson Weber, author of Sincerely, Emerson.

We squinted at tiny tableaus that nestled among the branches or at the base of the tree. A crochet version of eponymous puppy from Hot Dog rested on the tree while a cardboard replica of its bustling city lay below; Luli and her friends from Luli and the Language of Tea gathered in popsicle stick–chairs at a teacup-laden table around the tree’s trunk, underneath tea bag–shaped ornaments labeled with each language’s word for “tea."

I took especial care to photograph the trees I knew my mother would enjoy, ones based on the other books we read together growing up: Click, Clack, Moo!: Cows That Type, wrapped in lengths of cow-print ribbon and sporting a tree-topper of Farmer Brown, straw hat and all; Strega Nona, complete with a long coil of rope serving as the pasta bursting forth from her magic pot; Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, topped with sky-blue plumage and decked in silver baubles depicting the Pigeon's side profile, a giant goggly-eye and a tiny beak (not to mention hand-stitched Elephant and Piggie hidden among the branches!); and Blueberries for Sal, with ornaments featuring the words kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk adorning a tiny blueberry bush and a clay kitchen table piled high with blueberry-garnished dishes.

We paused longer at those trees that allow young visitors to take inspiration from their book’s message. One year, guests were invited to write their own food-related wordplay (“Orange you glad I made another pun?”; “I’m grape-full for you”; a snowman declaring, “I love BRRR-gers!”) and add them to a small wire tree next to the  punny Let’s Taco About How Great You Are tree. Another time, we spent nearly fifteen minutes reading the poems that a first grade class from Thoreau Elementary had written to cover their tree for How to Write a Poem (“My Bio Poem: I am special, I love my mom, I need gum, I want a puppy!!!”; “My Color Poem: Orange...tastes like oranges...smells like pumpkin pie...sounds like a fox...reminds me of haluween [sic]”).

More than once, I’ve teased my grandparents about moving to Concord, just so they can join one of the various decorating committees. They tease me right back, usually when a certain tree or its book involves obsessively reading: the tree for The Christmas Book Flood was literally made out of books, opened to a midpoint and stacked page-down on top of one another, a star-shaped scrap of a page at its peak. “There’s your tree,” Papa Norm said, and I hung my head in pretend shame. No family member of mine has ever been spared from my desire, and occasional impatience, to read or be read to (my aunt Steph, in a similarly mocking-yet-loving way, will recall that on her first Thanksgiving with my family, two-year-old me asked her to read me a story; unimpressed with her lack of character voices after a few pages, I laid my little hands over the page and said she could stop there). 

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Making a new tradition is beautiful and breaking them is bittersweet. Now that I’m once again living in Virginia, I won’t be able to attend the 29th Annual Family Trees. My grandparents still plan on going, and I look forward to seeing their sure-to-be copious photos when they visit for Christmas. I’m a little disappointed to not be able to see the new displays live this year, the obvious care and enthusiasm that went into creating them, but it’s just another delay. It took years before we started this tradition, and even that initial 2021 visit was plagued with holdups and false starts and misunderstandings. Our first attempt was first postponed by a few weeks after a delayed flight, and then by a few more hours after we ended up at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum instead (as my grandfather explained: “I didn’t realize you said it was at the Concord Museum. We just thought you were talking about a Concord museum”).

We haven’t returned to the deCordova on our subsequent Concord trips, but even as a one-off, it lives as a singular special memory — a mistake that only gave us more time to spend together. We might not enjoy this tradition as much if it were down to an exact science, a precise routine. Like the books that inspire the Family Trees, we change every year, choosing different dates, times of day, places to eat lunch before or afterward. All traditions have to begin as a new experience, and my grandparents love new experiences and traditions, they love reminiscing, they love making new memories. I love all of the above and happen to love them too.

All photographs in the slideshow courtesy of Emma Shacochis.