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If the people who celebrated the first Goose Day could see what we are doing with it now, we have to wonder what they would think.
There are goose-themed foods, goose shirts, goose ornaments, a road rally, a 5K and hundreds of drones forming geese in the sky.
This year, we’re adding a "Red, White & Goose" parade, Goose Washington, penny presses and, because apparently the geese we already have weren’t enough, an enormous goose on East Market Street.
Somewhere along the way, Goose Day got a little weird.
We think that’s a good thing.
Because after more than 200 years, Goose Day isn’t still around simply because people have carefully protected an old tradition. It’s still around because generation after generation has found new ways to have fun with it.
At its heart, the tradition remains remarkably simple: Eat goose on Sept. 29 and you’ll have good luck for the coming year.
But Goose Day today looks very different than it did 100 years ago -- or even 20 or 30 years ago.
And it should.
Sometimes we get so caught up in preserving traditions that we forget they aren’t supposed to be frozen in time. Keeping a tradition alive doesn’t mean doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same way, year after year.
It means giving people a reason to keep participating.
At some point, even the Goose Day events we now consider traditions were somebody’s new idea.
There was a first Goose Day Road Rally. There was a first 5K. There was a first person who suggested putting hundreds of drones in the sky and making them look like geese.
We imagine at least a few of those ideas were initially met with some version of, "You want to do what?"
Thankfully, somebody did it anyway.
Some of the new ideas will stick. Others probably won’t. That’s OK, too.
What matters is that people are still coming up with them.
A child watching a giant goose appear in the sky isn’t thinking about preserving a tradition that stretches back more than two centuries. Someone taking a selfie with Goose Washington probably isn’t thinking about their role in carrying local history into another generation.
But that’s exactly what they’re doing.
They’re participating.
And someday, one of the things we’re doing for the first time now may be something people can’t imagine Goose Day without.
That’s how traditions work.
We should absolutely preserve the story behind Goose Day. We should keep telling people why Sept. 29 matters here and how an old English tradition found a home in the Juniata River Valley.
There aren’t many communities that can claim something quite like it.
But respecting that history doesn’t mean Goose Day has to remain exactly as it was.
In fact, its ability to change may be one of the biggest reasons it has survived.
So keep the roast goose. Keep the traditions people have come to love.
But bring on Goose Washington, too.
Put 300 geese -- or drones that take the shape of geese -- in the sky. Hold a parade. Make another ridiculous goose-themed food. Come up with something next year that none of us has thought of yet.
Two hundred years from now, we certainly hope people in the Juniata River Valley are still eating goose on Sept. 29.
We also hope they’re celebrating it in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine.