The informant told me about the meat tray, which is basically a platter of appetizers. At any family gathering, the informant’s grandma (on her mom’s side) will bring out the meat tray only at her house. The tray consists of cheese, crackers, some type of sausage, black olives, and mini pickles. Informant says she’s never been to an event for her mom’s side of the family that hasn’t had the tray. It’s something that has always existed to her. She told me that she knows it’s serious to the family and the get-togethers because one year, her grandma forgot to make it and everyone flipped out. Even family out of state know about this story and how important it is to the family and any family function. The informant looked nostalgic when she spoke about it. If something is missing from the meat tray, the family also freaks out about it and makes comments about how they can’t eat from it until it’s complete. The informant thinks it started when there started being more and more grandkids, when the grandma’s children started having kids. It’s her mom and her two sisters who both have kids. The grandma oversees the meat tray. It’s not a family function without it. The family are big eaters, so for the informant, it feels like family gatherings are centered around food – the beginning of the gathering is when the meat tray is brought out and that’s truly when the event starts. Informant also mentioned that extended family come to enjoy it too and that it’s on open door policy at her grandparents and a lot of friends can come too, even on big holidays. The meat tray signifies gathering and union. This is a place where you can eat and feel like you’re being taken care of as the informant explained. It’s also important to the family considering the passing of the grandpa very recently and the meat tray was still brought out at the funeral. I find this to be a beautiful way of being close to your family, it’s fun and good to eat which is always a plus.
Author Archives: levinew@usc.edu
The Non-Denominational Gingerbread House
The informant spoke of her yearly tradition with her best friend that has been happening for nearly a decade. Every year, the informant and her best friend make a gingerbread house around the holiday season. The two alternate each year for who buys the materials and whose how will it be made at. The pairing listen to Christmas music while they construct the house and “eat most of the frosting.” For the first few years, they would wait until the new year and then they would smash it, but as they got older, they decided they wanted to keep the house alive because of the hard work and effort they put into decorating it and constructing it. The informant’s friend, we’ll call Jane, grew up strictly Jewish, so she missed out on all the Christmas traditions. “Starting like, November first, it’s decorated like Christmas” so Jane always felt like she was missing out on something and wanted to be in that “Christmas spirit” that “makes us all warm and fuzzy inside… even though it’s like 80 degrees out and feels hard to get into the Christmas spirit.” The informant grew up celebrating both holidays because her parents didn’t believe that religion should restrain from enjoying the holidays. The two friends brought their worlds together and since Christmas is such a major holiday, even if you don’t celebrate it, you know the songs and the traditions. So Jane learned from the informant all the feel-good Christmas songs and traditions through the construction of the gingerbread house that would sometimes be decorated in greens and reds and sometimes in Hanukkah colors. The informant told this story with a lot of happiness in her voice and you can tell she was recalling a lot of memories to share this bit of folklore. They do this every year and haven’t missed a single once since when they started (now in their twenties, have been doing it since they were 12). I loved this story for how heartwarming it is and how wholesome it is to bring two religions together through gingerbread cookies!
The Great Pumkpin
This informant told the story of how her mom would successfully manage to get her and her brother to throw away all their candy on Halloween. Each year, they would have a great big pumpkin, and by the end of Halloween night, they would give all their candy from their trick-or-treating to it. In return, the pumpkin would give back some sort of gift. The informant and her brother would be allowed to only keep only a few pieces of candy. The informant’s memories are most vivid from when she was a child; she remembers, for instance, her brother and her getting an orange razer scooter when they were around six and seven. In order to get the gift, you would have to dump all your candy in the pumpkin and the more candy you give, the bigger the gift would be. All the candy gets left there overnight, it’s kind of like the same premise of Santa Clause, because the next morning there would be a gift ready for them when they woke up. The informant spoke about how she and her brother loved doing this every year, and weren’t even big fans of candy so it made it easy to let go of the treats. The informant doesn’t know how her mom got the idea or if it was something her grandparents would do with her, and, up until a few years ago, the informant thought other people had participated in the same sort of event until a friend of hers had no idea what she was talking about when she brought it up. The informant looked back fondly on these memories. I think this is an interesting take on how to decrease childhood obesity and diabetes… that may sound extreme but I am a firm believer that these things start young and on holidays such as Halloween. I think I’ll use this same tactic when I have my own kids to avoid any rotten teeth. It’s definitely a smart idea.
The Garlic Necklace
This touches on folk beliefs, folk medicine, and homeopathic cures for illnesses. The informant spoke about her grandma who was born in 1935. Her grandma was always told by her aunt (the grandma’s mother’s sister) that to not catch a cold or the flue, you would have to put a necklace of raw garlic on around your neck, kind of like warding of vampires with raw cloves of garlic. The grandma never got sick because she would do that. However, it was not really that the clove of garlic warded off disease. It was more so that it wards of people because of how bad it smelled. She heard this from her mom when she was and it was passed from generation to generation. The informant touched on the humor of this specific piece of folklore, saying that though it did work, she laughingly explained it was because no one wants to be around someone who reeks of garlic. For this version of folklore, see the Buzzle article below on “Home Remedies For Common Cold & Cough In Children.” This article features a garlic treatment on how to make the garlic necklace for warding off colds and illnesses. I like this story because of how absurd it is. Clearly no one is going to sick with a garlic necklace on, no one wants to be around someone who smells terrible of garlic.
Bhosale, Shalaka. “Home Remedies For Common Cold & Cough In Children.” Buzzle, Buzzle.com, 15 Mar. 2005, www.buzzle.com/editorials/3-15-2005-67110.asp.
Ghosts of Prohibition Blues
In this story, our informant tells of a ghost story and/or legend that her aunt on her mom’s side has told her. Currently living in a small town in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, she and her husband moved out of their home after Hurricane Katrina. The informant explained that her aunt and uncle were the only people on their street to have survived the natural disaster. Considering the trauma, death, and destruction that they had experienced, they decided to move in 2009. That’s when they moved to a blues hall in Mississippi; this blues hall was special to the prohibition era that was in a dominantly black area. The locals would gather in this blues hall for music, dancing, and alcohol. Informant mentioned that “notoriously, when you do illegal things, bad things happen.” In this case, it was the consumption and making of alcohol. There were deaths in the hall because of it. So, moving in, informant’s aunt and uncle renovated half of the hall to make it into a house, and left the stage and parlor area, creating a business for throwing and booking events. After a year or so of living there, the aunt called her sister (informant’s mom) and told her “the craziest thing happened.” To which, she explained that she heard muffled voices coming from somewhere in the house. She also saw the dragging of a 12-ft. table across the parlor room. The aunt claims that these spirits aren’t harmful, but she does continue to hear voices and notices that things are always being misplaced. The informant first heard this eight years ago when these supernatural events happened in 2010. The informant enjoys telling this story because of how interesting the context of her family’s moving and its eeriness: coming from Hurricane Katrina to this setting is a different scenery, but still with an underlying tone of death. I personally think this is a super interesting piece of folklore and I wish there was more information on what kind of music was played and if there were ever any big names that came through the jazz hall. I also think it’s fascinating the context of why the family moved. They didn’t immediately leave New Orleans, but after they did, they went to another home where people were presumably murdered.