A tradition can begin with a practical necessity and survive as a moral requirement.

Many traditions started as the sensible response to a practical problem. A food preserved a particular way because there was no refrigeration, a gathering timed around a harvest, a rule about who does what because of how a household worked. The condition disappears and the practice remains, gradually acquiring a moral weight it never originally had.

With a family custom that causes friction, it is worth asking how it started. Sometimes knowing the practical origin lets everyone hold it more lightly, and occasionally it makes clear that the thing being defended so fiercely was once just a workaround.