Irrational is not the way I'd frame rituals. There is always a reason for theSe things and the reason can be explained, which does not lie in the object of the ritual itself but the purpose. We give gifts from our travels because it tells our loved ones we were thinking about them even while we were so far away from them. It retrospectively bridges a time-space gap. We bring these objects home for ourselves for various reasons but one might be that the object somehow represents the place we were, maybe it has the look of the place, maybe it literally just acts as a physical reminder, or maybe we have a collection of those things already-- and a collection being an explorative fixation on the multitude ways that a particular type of object can express itself.
