How to Create New Traditions That Honor Your Dad Without Forcing It
The Dead Dads Podcast
Scott Cunningham's kids start asking about Dairy Queen weeks before March 14th. Not because they're thinking about their late grandfather. Because they want a Blizzard. That's the whole point.
The Dairy Queen run is a tradition Scott built around his dad's birthday after realizing something uncomfortable: his kids were slowly running out of things to say about the man. The same few memories, recycled. The same short loop. And at some point in the not-too-distant future, he'd be the only one left who really remembered him — and any attempt to bring his dad up would get met with the eye-roll he remembered giving his own parents when they talked about his grandfather.
So he made a different move. Every March 14th, they go to Dairy Queen. The place was synonymous with his dad. The kids now ask, months out, when Papa was born. The conversation happens naturally, without anyone being corralled into a feelings exercise. As Scott wrote in his Dairy Queen or Bust blog post: "It gives me the perfect occasion to talk about my dad again with a minimum of rolled eyes, and I think that's pretty much what most of us want."
That story is a blueprint. Not for ice cream specifically — for the principle underneath it.
The Real Fear Isn't Grief. It's Erasure.
Most guys who've lost their dads aren't scared of feeling sad. They're scared of one specific outcome: that their dad will quietly disappear. Not in a dramatic way. Just over years, conversation by conversation, birthday by birthday, until the man becomes a vague outline. A few adjectives. "He was a good guy."
That fear is legitimate. And it runs alongside a competing fear that's equally strong: the worry that anything you create to prevent it will feel staged. That the solemn dinner or the memorial candle or the structured moment where everyone talks about what they miss will feel hollow, obligatory, and — worst of all — annoying to the people you're trying to include.
So most guys do nothing. And nothing has a cost.
The erasure doesn't announce itself. It happens in the gaps. The years when his birthday passes without mention. The family gatherings where his name doesn't come up because no one wants to be the one to make it heavy. The kids who never ask questions because they've never been given a reason to. Doing nothing feels like the safe choice, but it's actually the most costly one.
Why Most Tribute Traditions Collapse Before They Start
The ones that don't stick tend to have a structural problem: they make grief the main event.
The solemn dinner. The candle lighting. The formal moment where everyone sits in a circle and shares a memory. These are designed with the best intentions, but they're built around loss as the centerpiece. Everyone knows why you're doing it. The whole thing feels like a reminder that he's gone. Kids, especially, clock this immediately — they're attending a small, recurring funeral, not a celebration.
Research on what makes family traditions actually last points to something that matches this instinct. A tradition endures when it's genuinely enjoyable independent of its symbolic weight, and when it connects people to something larger than the immediate activity. As Fatherly notes in their piece on lasting traditions, when something feels obligatory rather than chosen, it won't survive. "If you feel like something is 'needs' to be done, it is not going to be a lasting tradition," family ritual researcher Janine Roberts told them.
The distinction between a tradition and a grief ritual is subtle but real. A grief ritual marks absence. A tradition marks presence. One is about the hole; the other is about the person. The goal isn't to skip the grief — it's to make the tradition enjoyable enough that the grief becomes something you can hold alongside the fun, not something the fun has to fight through.
The Dairy Queen run doesn't remind Scott's kids that their grandfather is dead. It reminds them that their grandfather existed, that he was a person their dad loved, and that his birthday is worth celebrating. That's a completely different emotional register.
The Dairy Queen Model: Why It Works
Scott's approach, described in detail in the Dairy Queen or Bust post, works because it reverses the usual formula. Instead of starting with grief and trying to soften it with something pleasant, it starts with something joyful and lets the connection to his dad be the reason for it.
Dairy Queen was already synonymous with his dad. The association was already there. Scott didn't manufacture meaning — he anchored an existing memory to a recurring, enjoyable event. March 14th became a date his kids actually wanted to arrive.
The result is that the conversation about his dad happens naturally, embedded in the asking: When was Papa born again? Is it time yet? Those questions open a door. They're not performed. They're not obligated. They're driven by the genuine desire for a Blizzard, which pulls the grandfather back into the room without making the room heavy.
This is the core principle. The tradition itself needs to be worth doing on its own terms. If it weren't fun, if it were just "we go sit somewhere quiet and remember Dad," the kids would endure it. Instead, they look forward to it. And in looking forward to it, they keep his birthday alive.
How to Find Your Version Without Overthinking It
This isn't about finding a template. It's closer to excavation.
Start with what he loved. Not what you think would be a dignified tribute — what actually connected him to joy. Was it a specific food? A sport? A place? A ridiculous TV show? A way he'd spend a Saturday morning? The more specific, the better. "He loved the outdoors" is too broad to build anything on. "He made the same bad joke every time we passed a Denny's" is a tradition waiting to happen.
Then ask a different question: what do you already do that quietly traces back to him? Bill Cooper, in his conversation on the Dead Dads podcast, made a point that landed hard. His advice to anyone who just lost their dad: "You probably have embraced either knowingly or unknowingly a family tradition. Keep embracing it, keep carrying it forward — because that will be a huge resource for your stability, your pride, and what they built and you are now building and how that passes on down."
Read that again. Knowingly or unknowingly. You might already be doing it and just haven't named it. The way you make coffee on Sunday mornings. The route you always take on a certain drive. The move you make in a card game. The things you say when something goes wrong. Some of these came from him. Naming them — even just internally — is the first step toward carrying them forward with intention.
Bill also mentioned something that captures the spirit of this without trying to: his nephew visits his father Frank's grave with a bottle of scotch. Nobody asked him to. Nobody organized it. He just does it, because it's the right thing to do in a way that's his. That's a tradition. It costs nothing. It required no planning committee. It just required someone paying attention to what felt true.
If you're looking for a place to start, the question isn't "what would make a good memorial." It's "what would make him laugh" or "what would he have wanted to do anyway."
What Your Kids Inherit When You Do — or Don't — Build This
If you have children, this isn't only about your own grief. It's about what they carry forward for the next fifty years.
Kids who don't get a story, a tradition, a reason to ask about their grandfather end up with a stranger. A name on a family tree. Maybe a framed photo they couldn't tell you much about. That's not inevitable — it's just what happens when nobody builds the bridge.
The kids who get the Dairy Queen run every March know why they're going. They ask questions. The conversation happens naturally, without being forced. The grandfather stays a person, not a concept. And when those kids eventually have their own kids, there's something to pass down — a date, a place, a reason.
Research on family rituals consistently shows that children who grow up with intentional traditions develop a stronger sense of identity and family belonging. But that framing — the research framing — undersells what's actually at stake here. This isn't about developmental outcomes. It's about whether your dad gets to be a real person to the people who come after you, or whether he slowly becomes a vague answer to a question nobody thinks to ask.
The What Your Kids Inherit When You Stop Talking About Your Dad post goes deeper on this — specifically what happens in the silence, and what gets lost when men default to not bringing it up.
The silence isn't neutral. Every year it continues, the grandfather gets a little further away. The tradition is how you keep closing that distance.
Start Small Enough to Actually Do It
The traditions that stick aren't the ones built in a single afternoon with the best intentions. They're the ones that were easy enough to repeat.
One meal. One drive. One annual trip somewhere he would have liked. One dish he made, cooked on his birthday. One bad movie he loved that you watch every year on the same date. None of these require anyone's buy-in except yours to start. If they're genuinely enjoyable — or at least genuinely him — they'll generate their own momentum.
You don't need permission to start. You don't need everyone on board in year one. You don't need it to feel emotionally significant the first time you do it. Scott's Dairy Queen tradition probably just felt like ice cream the first year.
It earns its weight over time. That's how traditions work.
If you have a story about something you do — a tradition you built, one you inherited without realizing it, or one you're still trying to figure out — there's a place for it on the Dead Dads website. Leave a message. Someone out there is still figuring out what March 14th is going to look like for them.
