By Afsana Elanko
Welcome Welcome to Thursday Connectors for this quarter, where I’m excited to be your editor taking you into the summer. It seems a time for festivals: to name a few, we saw Eid at the end of March, followed by Easter, Vaisakhi, Theravada, Passover (Pesach) and Hajj with Eid happening again later this month. This made me think about how we borrow traditions and customs from our ancestors and experiences from the past; forwarding them to the next generations. It may be religious acts or family customs we have, that were significant for generations gone and are significant for us today.
Connections with our ancestors are important. They give a sense of identity, belonging and history. We have borrowed family customs; we don’t know how they arose and yet they give us comfort, a sense of security and care. A sense that we matter, we are not alone. So, family rituals are integrally part of us and make us the complex, beautiful people we are. I’m always fascinated by how we incorporate these rituals and customs into our everyday lives and adapt them to current society and how we, in turn, pass them on to the next generation. How we borrow from friends and family who have gone, so that, by doing the same things, we are keeping them alive with us.
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On the theme of borrowing from the past and passing to the next generation, Juneha’s piece jumped out. The connection with the times gone by with her father and the times to come for the next generation was so endearing. The gentle message of love and quiet respect for her father is intertwined in her writing.
About Dad
There’s rarely a memory of my dad that doesn’t get me every time.
Filled with love and tinged with a laughter that forever lingered, these memories are not centred around occasions fully planned or on the agenda. They were ordinary occasions in the way they came together, but extraordinary in the way they landed, and owned their space.
That’s what defined my dad: his ability to turn every mealtime into a memorable moment. His ability to sit at the dining table and make it as much as about the unfiltered conversation as much as it was about the shared food. That ability to put a smile on everyone’s faces so effortlessly, and that quality of being someone spectacular while under the guise of appearing so ordinary.
There was something special in the way he spoke. He wasn’t particularly eloquent or polished. Signs of a good speaker is not what is said, but how it is said and how people receive what is said. And Dad could certainly hold a crowd. Based on facts, intertwined with imagination, he told a good story. I particularly remember the one he told about the young woman who left her baby in the pushchair to do his weekly shop for him. The lady was nothing less than a superhero, according to him, and had reduced him to tears with her kindness. By the time she returned home that day, the world and his wife knew about this lady with the pushchair who helped an old man in distress.
“No, it wasn’t quite like that,” I remember telling my aunt, when she called me to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. “I bumped into Dad while out shopping with the little one, and asked if he needed anything, that’s all.”
“But according to your dad, you…”
“You know what Dad’s like,” I reminded her.
“Yes.” She giggled. “I do.”
It was simple: Dad saw and felt the love and spread it tenfold. The beauty wasn’t in the finer details, but in what he chose to highlight, to give people more credit than actually due. In a world where it’s a struggle to be seen sometimes, he made sure everyone got more than their 15 minutes. He put people at the core. That was his legacy. And I hope it will be mine, too.
Because when everything else disappears, it’s only the laughter and words that still remain: so honest, so real, and so raw.
© Juneha Chowdhury, 2026
Connect with Juneha on X: @junehachowdhury
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In our next piece, Sebastian looks at customs and how these change over time. How we adapt to societal changes and how norms change with commercialisation and globalisation. It opens a door to how children see things and how they are the observers of society, trying to understand the world around them. I wonder how customs will change in the future?
Customs: The Rivers That Carve New Banks
Every country, every region, every community has various customs, their sense of pride and standing in society, the world. These ancient customs are a property received from our Ancestors – an honour passed down from generation to generation, or something that continues through generations to their descendants. These customs are not written in books, but are written in hearts and passed on to the next generation. The customs we practise have meanings. Some we know. Some we do not. Some we have still to learn. But we still practise them.
Here, I bring some customs from my Tamil heritage and how they have changed, adapted, or evolved with time. As we know, the world is not static. In olden days, cow dung was used to polish the clay floor. I asked my grandmother why, when I was five years old. She said people believed cow dung had antiseptic agents and poor people could not afford , cement or tiles, so they used cow dung. I thought, ‘Yuck!’ at the time and didn’t believe a word. Years later, when I was studying for my A-level, I sat on floors that were polished by cow dung when I visited poor people to teach their children.
When I was little, the adults welcomed visitors by putting their hands together in the prayer position, saying in Tamil: “Vanakkam Vaanga,” meaning: “Greetings. Welcome.” Nowadays, customs are changingand joining the palms together is fading, but the wording remains steadfast in memory and practice. My grandma served tea or cooled yoghurt water in a silver tumbler and silver saucer to the visitors. It was a custom. I always wondered, why silver? I questioned my grandmother. She said: “My grandma did it, so I do it too.” Then I researched in old Tamil literature and found out that silver has antimicrobial activity. Even a quick google search today: *Does silver have antimicrobial properties?gives an AI overview: *Yes, silver is a highly effective, broad-spectrum antibacterial agent.I wonder how this custom of silver developed, and how it was more readily available in certain communities, and more abundant in certain regions of the world. How customs develop within regional areas due to the resources available and how commercialisation disrupts that inner balance of nature.
These are a few customs that stick in my mind and there are many more. The question is, do we follow them in the modern era? I believe we still do, but with tweaks and changes adapted to society and the world around us, especially since globalisation has changed communities greatly.
Customs are not monuments. They are rivers. They carve new banks while carrying the same water forward.
© Sebastian Elanko, 2026
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Easter has now passed us, but I wanted to include Eithne’s light-hearted piece here.
Easter
We went to church each day: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday – a proper midnight mass with bells and candles, midnight mass.
But where did he come from? The Easter Bunny?
The shops were all closed on Good Friday, except the bakers, they opened their doors to sell hot cross buns. The baker liberally scattered bun spices round the doorway to entice buyers in. They were not available all year round, just on Good Friday.
But where did he come from? The Easter Bunny?
We gave up sweets or cakes or chocolate for lent. It was a time to fast, give something up. So that when we ate a chocolate egg on Easter Day, it was a special treat, breaking our fast.
But where did he come from? The Easter Bunny?
We sent Easter cards with chicks and bunny rabbits, daffodils and special messages.
But where did he come from? The Easter Bunny?
He must have crept into our world, unseen, to open up the season; give the children fun, and shower the world with chocolate treats.
He wasn’t there when I was a child, and I wonder…
Where did he come from? The Easter Bunny?
© Eithne Cullen, 2026
Connect with Eithne on X: @eithne_cullen and on Instagram: @eithnecullen57
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We have another Easter piece from Alison, reflecting experiences I’m sure a lot of readers can identify with. I like the connection of food uniting us; no matter which culture or religion we may belong to.
My Family Traditions At Easter
Family gatherings for special celebrations have always been occasions that I treasured and still do. Arriving into a large family, fourth in the birth order of six children, there was already an established rhythm of customs and traditions.
Easter was always celebrated in a moderately low-key way for us growing up in the 1960’s. Chocolate Easter eggs never featured in early life. My mum would boil a batch of white chicken eggs in scarlet cochineal water to dye them. When these were dry, we would decorate them with lines and patterns using inky pens. I remember other kids bragging about their stash of chocolate eggs, wrapped in pretty coloured foil, sometimes with extra sweets inside them. I envied them.
Easter Sunday for us would be celebrated by gathering for a family meal, at lunchtime, which we called dinner. We sat down, squeezed together around the kitchen table on an assortment of chairs and stools. The plump golden roasted chicken was the centrepiece: a rare vision, only eaten on special occasions. It would always be served with mashed potatoes – my mum never made roast potatoes; I’m not entirely sure why! There were boiled carrots, green cabbage, peas and, as it was a special day, overnight-soaked and boiled butterbeans, too, with lots of tasty cooking stock gravy..
On special Sundays we would have a dessert – pudding to us. It might be a homemade layered trifle, based with chunks of sponge, then tinned fruit cocktail (I hated the cherries and grapes, so these were passed to my brother), set with a tangy tangerine jelly. Happily stirring the jelly, breathing the sweet hot citric steamas it dissolved in the boiling water. Then, closely watching and waitinguntil it reached the magic turning point, cool enough to pour and start to set. Once firmly set in the fridge with the fruit, a layer of cooled*creamy custard was added across the top. Finally topped by Mum with fancy swirls of piped whipped dairy cream, and served with super-sweet tinned evaporated milk, if we wanted some – and, of course, we did.
We all helped one way or another with the preparation, cooking, table setting, hand-washing and drying dishes and pots. Leftovers are something of a mystery to me, we never saw any, ever. All food that was cooked was eaten and cleared the same day; that’s the beauty of cooking for eight hungry mouths.
© Alison Awbery, 2026
Connect with Alison on Instagram: @plot59awellbeingwithnature
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Thank you for connecting with me and I look forward to seeing you again next month, when I’ll be bringing you more delightful pieces to share. My invitation to you: please submit your work, and you, too, could see it on this page!
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