Tag Archives: annual

Facebook Senior Names

Background: 

My informant, AK, is a 19 year old student at the University of Michigan. She was born and raised in Southern California and is studying engineering. While in high school, AK was an active member and team captain of her school’s swim team. She attended the school from kindergarten until she graduated and knew the place inside and out. (I’ll be referring to myself as SW in the actual performance).

Performance: 

AK: For as long as I can remember, it’s been tradition at our high school to make a fake name on facebook for senior year. Everyone would make a pun based off their name, referencing a movie or celebrity. When it first started, it was to protect people’s identities, so that of prospective colleges looked up students on facebook, they wouldn’t find their page. By the time we were seniors, there wasn’t really a need to do this because it was general knowledge that colleges didn’t really care, but our grade kept on with the tradition anyways.

Thoughts:

It’s interesting to understand where some aspect of folklore comes from, and to see how its meaning has changed over time. What started as a superstition morphed into a tradition that stood to be a rite of passage. Kids as early as freshman year would begin to think about their senior name, anxious to be done with high school and on their way to college. Senior names were a way of expressing yourself, while also engaging in a unifying experience across the grade.

Trip to the Sea

Main Piece
John Ledyard was a Dartmouth student, and he paddled a canoe from Dartmouth, all the way to the ocean. So every year now since then, we do something called the “Trip to the Sea”, where they model his journey, and you canoe from Dartmouth down the Connecticut river out to the Atlantic Ocean, over by Connecticut.

Background
The informant was a student at Dartmouth College, where she observed this tradition taking place. She did not participate in the tradition, but knew closely someone who did. Dartmouth College is situated high on the Connecticut River, which drains out south through Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and then to Connecticut, connecting it with the Atlantic Ocean.

Context
The informant is a 23-year-old women, born and raised in Southern California. She graduated Dartmouth College in 2018, having attended since 2014. This information was provided to me while seated outside her family home in Palm Springs, California, on April 20th, 2019.

Analysis
I would love to claim to want to participate in this tradition, but after consulting a map, I don’t think I would want to. The trip is really long, spanning four different states! However, I love that this tradition has continued and that they do it every year! I think that the students who complete the Trip to the Sea must feel very proud and accomplished, and I bet receive great respect from other students. This seems typical of Dartmouth – they seem to have many outdoor activities and traditions, probably from being so isolated up in the woods! I also find it interesting that this John Ledyard has two seperate traditions rooted with his name at Dartmouth – must have been very influential. According to the additional research I did in the Dartmouth Folklore Collection, this ritual has a further tradition: the participants row nude through Hartford, Connecticut, until they reach the city boundaries. It is also only the seniors who take part in the trip – making the ritual into something looked forward to over their Dartmouth career, truly cementing the ritual as a kind of initiation-like ritual, including the students into a longstanding history of others who have completed the trip.

For another collection of this ritual, please see the Dartmouth Folklore Collection. It can be found online, or currently through this hyperlink: https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/folklorearchive/2016/05/27/trips-to-the-sea/

The Mendyke Open

Context: I collected this from a friend on a trip over Spring Break, after he’d heard me talking about folklore with another friend I was collecting from.

Background: This is an annual gathering that my friend’s family holds. Below is a story illustrating the type of events that happens at these gatherings.

Dialogue: My great-grandfather, before he died… Uh, eventually he was one of the oldest people at these gatherings, and… and um, as I mentioned there were these golf courses and so, they’d basically all get together and play golf, um… So, at one point, my great grandfather decided to— that he’d go play a round. Now, at this point he was, like, in his 90s, he was pretty much blind, pretty much deaf, um… So he gets up to the golf course, he takes the golf, uh, the, the golf club, and he starts aiming the golf ball, but… it seems to be in the complete opposite direction, or like a completely different direction than where the hole is, and so everyone is just, they start yelling, “No, not that way, the other way! That way!” And he just shoos them off, and, uh, everyone’s like, “Okay, I guess he’s crazy, just let him be.” So, he swings, er, he holds it up, he swings, and hits… and a hole in one!

Analysis: The story above isn’t something that my friend himself witness, but something he’d been told by other family members. Because of this, the story feels more like an example of the family’s camaraderie, and how them coming together brings about exciting events. It’s more about the experience of being together as a family than any actually miraculous golf swing that could happen.

Mother’s Day and Lilac Festival

M is a 20-year-old black woman. She is currently double majoring in NGO’s and Social Change and Communications at the University of Southern California. M grew up in Boston, MA but currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. M primarily speaks English, but she is also fluent in Spanish.

M: My mom always gets the day off and we always go to the Lilac Festival on Mother’s day, ’cause it happens at the same time.

Me: Aww.

M: It’s like, we have the Arboretum in Boston, and there’s like, all these lilacs get planted and they all bloom like almost, like on command on Mother’s day. So, when we were kids, my dad would always take us to the Arboretum and give my mom the day to herself.

Me: But now your mom goes with you?

M: Hmm? Oh, yeah.

Mother’s day definitely means a good deal to M and her family. They have an annual tradition that they go to the Lilac Festival at the Arboretum in Boston every year to celebrate the day. Though the tradition has changed a small bit from giving their mother the day to herself to having he come long with them, it is still a good way to celebrate her and she still gets a nice day of relaxation. It is common to just send your mother a card and or gift to celebrate the day, but M and her siblings carry on the tradition of spending the day with their mom and showing her their appreciation by reserving the day for her, even after they have moved out.

Easter Egg Hunting with Siblings

M is a 20-year-old black female who is currently double majoring in NGO’s and Social Change and Communications at the University of Southern California. M grew up in Boston, MA but currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. M primarily speaks English, but she is also fluent in Spanish.

Me: Does your family have any fun holiday traditions?

M: Um. We are aggressive when it comes to Easter baskets. My mom is really happy that my brother aren’t home for Easter anymore because, I think she though she could like stop when I like reached 16, and she had the Easter baskets like out on the table, like you know, like we always do the hunt and then go to church, but she left them out on the table and we came downstairs and we were very upset and we told her she had to hide them, so she did, unfortunately very aggressively. And we didn’t even find them before church, so we had to go, we still didn’t have our baskets, and then it took us another hour and a half to find them when we got home. She was really annoyed. she was like, you’re ll adults you don’t need these, and my sister was…my sister to be fair was only 12, so she was like I am not an adult at all, like I want mine hidden. Then when my mom hid hers, my brother was like I’m only 14 and she was like ok. Then I was like, you can’t hide theirs and not mine. And then that’s when she was like, alright, these bitches… Yeah.

M talks about an annual family tradition of her mom hiding their Easter baskets and candy for her and her two siblings. Their mom thought that when they reached a certain age, that she could stop hiding the eggs, but the children all wanted to keep the tradition going. There was a sense of maturing and distancing from old childhood memories and games that the kids did not yet want to let go of, and so they continued the tradition until they moved out of the house. Not only was the Easter basket hunt fun for the kids, and kept their childhood spirit alive, but it was more time spent with siblings bonding and working together to find their baskets. They will likely carry on the tradition when they have children as it meant so much to them growing up.