Most of us can feel it: culturally, we’re a bit unmoored when it comes to honoring milestones, seasons, and rites of passage. We shrug off these ancient markers as outdated, or we go through the motions: attending graduations, lighting candles for holidays, without letting them reach down into the roots of our being.
But what if we took these occasions and infused them with more presence? More personality? More soul?
I know – our attention is a scarce and sacred resource. But I want to make a case for reclaiming ritual, ceremony, and celebration. Not as mere decoration, but as an act of devotion. To your family. To your values. To the meaningfulness of life.
This summer, my son turned 18.
The idea of becoming an “adult” meant almost nothing to him. And honestly, why should it? He’s been homeschooled so no graduation ceremony or looming college transition. He’s not interested in the military (thankfully), and (sadly) he doesn’t yet grasp the power or privilege of voting. Turning 18, to him, was just another orbit around the sun.
Still, I couldn’t let it pass without some kind of mark. I wanted to respect his orientation, but I also felt the importance of symbolically honoring this crossing a threshold, not into instant adulthood, but into a new personal era.
So my husband and I began searching for a way to celebrate. The trouble was, our son is a minimalist in every sense. He wants very little, resists new experiences, and has a clear “please don’t” radar when it comes to fanfare.
And then an idea fell into our laps.
What if we brought the celebration to him, in a language he understands?
Instead of dragging him to some event, we decided to create an escape room at home, custom-built around fantasy and friendship, puzzles and imagination, all things he loves. It was the perfect fusion of his preference for staying home and our desire to honor him with something special.
At first, the idea was exciting. Then… daunting. After a month of procrastination (what had we signed ourselves up for?), we enlisted some terrifyingly useful help from ChatGPT and, within a week, designed a fantasy-themed, coming-of-age storyline for the game.
We’d never created anything like this before. But like any real ritual, it had all the elements: mystery, symbolism, journey, transformation.
Blacklights. Voice distortion. Homemade potions. Ciphers scrawled in secret script. Slowly, the story-world came to life, infused with our personalities, our love of puzzles and myth, our devotion to who our son is and who he’s becoming.
It was a living love letter.
And then, something magical happened. His friends, all wonderfully neurospicy in their own ways, entered the game with full hearts and wild creativity. They donned costumes. They committed to the quest. They used their unique strengths and supported each other through every puzzle and twist.
When they cracked the final cryptex, they emerged from the house to find a tunnel of parents (the “Council of Elders”) waiting to welcome them. They placed the lost heartstone on the fire, sealing the ritual and claiming their treasure: a loot box filled with DnD dice and goodies.
But here’s the part I didn’t anticipate:
We didn’t just create a unique rite of passage for our son.
We spoke his language.
What if more of us did that? What if we stepped outside the box of inherited traditions and infused our celebrations with the texture of our actual lives? What if we gave ourselves permission to play again – to invent new symbols, speak in metaphor, mark time with magic?
In an age when the old stories are cracking and the cultural scaffolding feels unstable, we need new myths. Not to abandon the past, but to remix it – creatively, reverently, imaginatively.
Because when we do that, we give the next generation something to anchor into. We help them feel the weight and wonder of who they are and the thrill of becoming something new.
What is the language your child speaks? What would you love creating? How might you dip into their world as an act of devotion to who they truly are? It will no doubt take time, effort, and a heaping dose of playful creativity, but I guarantee it will mark time in a way that transforms both you and them, and you will be SO glad you did it.
