The Bell Curve:

A few hours after you read this, a contingent of people of every age will be collecting across the street from my bay window. There will be kids with wagons standing by for loads, and fathers and mothers pouring sand topped by a candle into brown paper bags, and geezers like me watching and offering advice because we are worthless for any other duty.

As twilight deepens, the wagons will be loaded with the paper bags and pushed and pulled through the streets of what used to be Santa Ana Heights before we were annexed by Newport Beach.

And the bags will be spaced along our street curbings, and the candles lit, and suddenly the streets will be transformed into the magical lights of Christmas, celebrating whatever each of us chooses to make of this holiday.

I have lived in this neighborhood for 25 years, raising a second family and happily buying into the tradition of the luminaries, where I worked on the sand detail until I was gently replaced as too slow. But this history qualifies me to predict that in a few hours the work detail will be forming, offering assurances that I need because I would feel a personal loss if that bit of Christmas tradition were to run its course while I’m still around to watch it disappear.

Like faith versus science, tradition and change seem light years apart, surfacing as opponents most notably in disputes with a high emotional content. Like building a mall on a sacred historical site. Or shutting down — for a more profitable tenant — a carousel at a local shopping center that shared its space with Santa Claus at Christmastime to delight an endless line of children who will no longer be able to enjoy the ride while they wait.

Nostalgia comes easily for me. But I’m also aware of the risk — as many studies have found — that as we grow older, we revert to the child in us who suffers change badly and builds high defenses around tradition. I think the one thing that those who fear change need to understand most is that change need not be — and usually isn’t — disrespectful of tradition.

For example, just a few days before this upcoming night of luminaries, our annual neighborhood Christmas party was full of both change and tradition. Several families that had moved out of our neighborhood were back for the party, upholding tradition. And young parents who grew up here were also back to induct a new generation of their kids into tradition.

It isn’t a tough sell. The group most likely to resist change are the children themselves. To kids, the familiar — even when it isn’t altogether satisfying — is infinitely preferable to the unknown. That’s why one of the goals of family life to my wife and me was creating a balance between change and tradition.

When my children were growing up in a suburb of Chicago, we drove away for many years from the traditional Midwestern white Christmas to Florida, where we spent the holidays. But we took our other Christmas traditions along with us. Decorating the tree on Christmas Eve was followed by church music wherever we could find it and gift opening on Christmas morning. Celebrating Christmas now with their own families, our children have carried on some of these traditions and discarded others. And their children, in turn, will do the same.

Although it is quite possible for change and tradition to live together in harmony, sometimes tradition can become a mote in the eye of change. It’s a fine line, indeed. Every family and every country has its own set of traditions. They are the stable reference points which prevent our lives from being in a constant state of tilt. But when tradition hardens into rigidity — into a kind of mental rigor mortis — the joy is squeezed out of it.

We are creating some new Christmas changes in my family this year — and hoping that we may also be creating the beginning of some new traditions in the process. For three decades, I have traveled to Boulder, Colo., to spend an early Christmas with my youngest daughter, Debby, and her family. This Christmas, she will be coming here, and there will be a kind of family revival meeting. Hopefully, my two grandsons and their girlfriends will come also to share this new sense of family and the changes and adjustments that go along with it.

I suppose traditions die hardest at Christmastime, which bodes well for our luminaries. I just hope that my grandsons show up early enough to share my view of the luminary assembly line. And to join me in shouting to anyone within hearing “Merry Christmas!”

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in the Newport Beach section of Santa Ana Heights. His column runs Thursdays.