Kate Hawley: News flash: Christian holidays have pagan roots. A wide-eyed report from Agence-France Presse tells us it “seems odd” that Easter, a Christian holiday, can be traced back to a spring ritual named for the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility. Numerous variations on this story abound.

Another story in The St. Petersburg Times this week introduces us to Purim, in a headline calling it “an untraditional tradition.” It’s a fascinating turn of phrase, begging the question, untraditional to whom? Not to those who have celebrated it for thousands of years, one assumes, but to the newspaper’s readership.

Stories like these present a curious rub: when and how to do stories about religious holidays? News, with its perpetual cant toward the near future, can bump awkwardly against tradition, by definition unchanging over time.

I used to work at the Swedish American Museum in Chicago, one of a handful of small museums devoted to the city’s ethnic heritage. Every Christmas, we were inundated with calls from journalists wanting to write about Lucia, the Swedish festival of lights in which a white-clad girl wears a crown of candles on her head and sings carols. Not only was it a photo-worthy event (blond girls, candlelight, snowflakes), it solved a recurring problem. To be topical in December, news outlets need holiday stories. But you can’t write about people opening presents under a tree, or singing carols, or even lighting a menorah. That’s old news. You need a fresh angle. And so variations on religious tradition, or contradictions within a tradition, make their way into the news. It’s an instance of how media reflect — and sometimes create — religious norms and exceptions.

It’s a cultural high-wire act, hard to execute flawlessly. But at least these stories are a boon to religious diversity. And they have a subtler function. Back to the Swedes: in 1999 “Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition is Change,” an exhibit with an accompanying glossy art book, traveled the States. Its thesis, in rough miniature, is that what is old survives because it is constantly remade, and through this process the past becomes part of the continuous present. For a story to survive, what is old must be made new again. Journalists who write these occasionally awkward stories about religious traditions we should all probably know about anyway are in this sense valuable folklorists, reforging stories for the present, giving them some small, new life.