There is nothing inherent to a tradition that says it is beneficial. This is a common fallacy, solved by keeping in mind the fact that perpetuising factors are various: laziness in habit being foremost amongst them! Sometimes it's very hard to tell whether a tradition is positive, negative, or just a bunch of stuff that happens.
April Fool's Day, for example, might be considered good because people have a laugh over it, or bad because people sometimes go too far and cause injury etc.; but that overall they'd probably be doing similar stuff anyway. Why do we have "days" for things as if our activities have such a monotony to them that without specific days for things we'd be unable to break into a creative rut? Experiments in creating interesting days and celebrating them often go quite well all the same; taken perhaps to its logical extent in the French Republican Calendar.
(As with the bulk of this patterns collection, I scribbled this pattern down back in December 2006 and though I agree with the principle still now that I come back to describe it in more detail, I'm not sure if I had a specific example in mind or not that would have well illustrated it. Let that be a lesson to document patterns as you think of them!)
- NoSacredCows