Author Archives: okerstro

Christmas Music Car Ritual

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C: “My Grandma started this ritual because she was a very big fan of the Thanksgiving holiday and a very firm believer that like, Christmas season doesn’t start until Thanksgiving passes. Um, and so she started this thing in the car that you are not allowed to listen to Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving. Um, and then it’s like- it was believed it was bad luck, like it’s not proper, like, um, I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like we’re not celebrating the holidays in the proper way. And if someone requests it it’s like- like I have personally before been like ‘should we listen to Christmas music’ and been like shunned by my brothers being like ‘No! Grandma says we do not listen to Christmas music in the car until after Thanksgiving, like Grandma does not allow that.’ So it is like a holiday ritual now that we follow.”

Interviewer: “And was it like a big deal when you could listen to Christmas music again?”

C: “Mhm! Especially when it would be with my Grandma, because she would have in her car this, like, plastic container that was at least a foot long that had all of the CDs of Christmas albums, like, stacked. So like, it was when that got transferred from her garage into the car after Thanksgiving, that was the signal of ‘okay, now it’s time’ and then it like- it was like finally, we can ask and we don’t have to be afraid of her being like, ‘no, it’s not Thanksgiving yet.’”

Interviewer: “Would that be something, like, an act that you witnessed, or would it be like a fun surprise?”

C: “No, we would see her do it, because we practically lived with her for most of my childhood, so we would see her from the garage get- like, we knew where it was in the garage- get it and put it in. And then it was a thing of like, we can each grab one of the CDs and pick the ones we wanted, and then she would put them in and then take the next one out and be like ‘what’s the next song to have on?’ So it was like an actual little ritual thing.”

Context
C is a current student at the University of Southern California and grew up in Palm Desert, California. She explained that the ritual always occurred the day after Thanksgiving. When asked if anyone had ever broken the rule about no Christmas music in the car before Thanksgiving, C laughed nervously and admitted that she is a massive fan of Christmas music and sometimes listens to it in her AirPods during the summer, but that she “will NOT tell anyone” in her family, as they would still react poorly. Her pre-Thanksgiving Christmas music listening is restricted to her AirPods, however; she described one instance in which she began to listen to Christmas music in the car with her boyfriend before Thanksgiving, but felt “too guilty” and had to turn it off. Despite her love of Christmas music, C believes she will continue the tradition and ritual with her future family.

Analysis
This ritual seems to be a very calendric/seasonally-based ritual enforced, as C mentioned, to ensure the ‘proper’ and time-appropriate celebration of the seasons. I have noticed that the United States, especially in commercial settings, tends to begin preparing for Christmas well in advance of the holiday, often de-emphasizing Thanksgiving celebrations by barely squeezing it in between Christmas and Halloween. By establishing listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving as a forbidden practice, C’s grandmother is able to keep the lines between different seasons and celebrations distinct and honor each in their own time. In doing so, she also created a ritual that, from C’s description, served as a fun and fondly-remembered marker of the beginning of the Christmas season for her and her grandchildren.

Christmas Ornament Ritual

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K: “Okay, so during, um, Christmas time, whenever my family puts all the ornaments up on our Christmas tree, or like, we decorate the Christmas tree, we have two ornaments that we always put on in a specific order. So we have the pickle ornament, which goes on second to last, and then we have this little clip-on, like, cardinal ornament, and we always put that on our Christmas tree last.”

Me: “Is this something that your parents explicitly taught you, or did you kind of come up with it as a family, like it formed organically?”

Kae: “I can’t really remember, but every time that we do it, like, nowadays, they’re always like ‘remember! Don’t put the pickle on the tree or the cardinal on the tree because they go on last!’ So I guess they kind of remind us.”

Context
K is a current student at the University of Southern California. They spent most of their childhood in Chicago, Illinois before their family moved to North Carolina, where they currently live when not in school. K stated that they believe the tradition started with their immediate family and has been going on for over a decade. K said they felt it was for fun, but that the ornaments were ‘special’ to them and their family. When asked to elaborate, K explained that the cardinal ornament in particular was something that their parents had bought and that belonged to their parents, which attributed it a special quality for them. As for the pickle, K explained how they had heard that “sometimes people put a pickle in the Christmas tree. Which is where the pickle ornament might come from.” K did not indicate that the pickle ornament had any specific significance to their family outside of it being part of their tradition. They also did not indicate why the pickle or cardinal were placed on the tree in their given order, but noted that doing so gave a definitive sense of the tree being completed.

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As K suggested, this seems to be a seasonal ritual that indicates the official ‘closing’ or end of the decoration of the Christmas tree. By using the same, specific set of ornaments each time, K’s family all receive a clear visual signal that their decorating ritual is complete. That the cardinal ornament — the last ornament to go on the tree — is an ornament that seems to hold special sentimental value to K’s parents helps to further underscore themes of family and togetherness that typically characterize the Christmas season. It is also interesting to note that, according to K, the representation of the pickle may stem from another set of folk practices that have now been incorporated into a different context, showing the adaptability and evolution of folklore.

Birthday Breakfast & Dinner Ritual

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K: “Okay so another one that we have is when it’s somebody’s birthday, in our family, uh, for- for breakfast, they would get a choice between, um, cinnamon rolls for breakfast or donuts for breakfast, like, specifically dunkin’ donuts or like the pillsbury cinnamon rolls that you would buy at the grocery store. And then every night for dinner they got to choose a place to eat out, or like, choose what we eat for dinner.”

Interviewer: “That’s awesome! Where did the food selections come from? Like, who kind of decided that those were the food selections?”

K: “I think my mom, uh, because cinnamon rolls for breakfast or donuts for breakfast, those are like- like a big deal in the house. Like, that’s not something we do, we would normally- I mean I don’t get really hungry around breakfast time, but whenever, like, whenever we would eat breakfast it would just be waffles or a bagel or like, a piece of you know, toast. So like making cinnamon rolls or ordering donuts is like a special occasion. They’re like special breakfast foods.”

Interviewer: “And for the choosing, um, where you wanna go for dinner, is that something that’s discussed beforehand or is it like, the person no matter what is like ‘we’re going here’?”

K: “It’s pretty much your choice. Like, whenever I choose dinner, I go to, um, Potbelly’s, which is this sandwich chain that started in like Chicago and they just got a couple in North Carolina. So I just- I choose there, and I mean, someone can not like it but you don’t really have a choice because it’s not your birthday, so everyone just has to go with whatever the um, the birthday person wants to do.”

Context
K is a current student at the University of Southern California. They spent most of their childhood in Chicago, Illinois before their family moved to North Carolina, where they currently live when not in school. In addition to birthday breakfasts, K stated that theri family would sometimes also have donuts after Mass and typically have cinnamon rolls for Christmas breakfast, which they thought contributed to the idea of these foods being for “big exciting occasions.” They also described that they would typically consider and eat these foods as dessert foods. For dinner, K added that their family goes to Potbelly’s outside of K’s birthday celebrations, but that they really like the food there. Now that they’re in college, K says they see it as an extra special opportunity, since they have a summer birthday and the Potbelly’s chain has no locations on the West Coast, where they go to school.

Analysis
Both K’s family’s breakfast and dinner birthday rituals seem to showcase some form of ritual inversion. In the case of breakfast, foods that are typically only had for dessert are instead the main focus of the meal in order to emphasize the special nature of the occasion. In the case of dinner, what restaurant to go to or what food to each, which would perhaps otherwise be a group or family decision, is handed over to the birthday person, attributing them extra power and special status on their birthday. This ritual seems to have taken on an added meaning for K now that they attend college on the West Coast; by almost always eating at Potbelly’s, a restaurant they enjoy, K is able to reaffirm their identity ties to Chicago and North Carolina.

Break a Leg Ritual

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“So this is like the traditional ‘break a leg!’ before a performance, because I’m a theater major. But before any type of performance, instead of just saying ‘break a leg,’ the performing group that I grew up in since I was a kid to high school, we always would say ‘break ALL your legs.’ As like a way of saying ‘you’re even gonna do better than just break a leg, like you’re gonna have a phenomenal performance.’ And then we would- I don’t know how to explain this properly, but we basically lock our pinky fingers together, and then like, bump each other’s hips, each hip twice, and then like, spin, like, turn with our arms. And I was like- everyone in the group that I grew up in performing did this, um, and was incredibly superstitious about it. It was a thing of like, even if you were called to places, you would run backstage to the other side of the stage to find the other people in the cast to do it to. Because it was an incredibly, like, you HAVE to do this. Like, if not something’s gonna go wrong. Um, and so I was incredibly superstitious about it. Like if I didn’t get the chance to do it to everyone, I, like, I was not comfortable on stage and I was like ‘something’s gonna go wrong, I’m gonna mess up, just it’s not gonna be the performance I know it can be.’

And now that I’m in college and I’m not part of this performing group anymore, I still carry it on. Um, especially with this one, like, performance group I’m part of. Backstage before every show that I’ve started since freshman year doing, I teach it to like anyone who’s new in the group, and I do it with as many people in the cast as I can do, and I even like, explain the story of it to people, like ‘this is something I used to do in my past performing community that I was a part of, and we’d say break all your legs,’ and I teach it to them and then like, they go on to do it to other people in the cast and explain it to them. So it’s something I’m like carrying on and spreading to other people.”

Context
C is a current student at the University of Southern California and grew up in Palm Desert, California. She gave the context that she had been part of the same local theater group for her preteen and teenage years until coming to college. When asked to elaborate about some of the logistics of the ritual, C explained how the ritual would be done between two people in the cast, with the goal of everyone in the cast eventually doing it with everyone else. She also stressed the importance of performing the ritual as immediately before the beginning of the performance as possible. She also described how different people in her original group believe in different degrees of consequences for not performing the ritual with everyone in the cast; while some people think it is not strictly necessary, many, including C, believe that there will be “severe and immediate consequences” during the performance for not doing it with everyone. Finally, C explained that, while she is not sure when the ritual began, allegedly everyone who her director had worked with had a similar kind of ritual, which leads her to believe it stemmed from him and evolved to what it is today.

Analysis
As C acknowledged, this tradition takes a widely-known example of theater-specific performative speech and adds an additional physical element as added superstitious behavior. I would say that this ritual combines elements of homeopathic and contagious magic. By believing that not performing this ritual correctly induces bad luck, this theater group exhibits the ‘like produces like’ belief behind homeopathic magic; however, the contact required for the ritual, perhaps to ‘share luck’ amongst the cast, suggests that the connection between two cast members lingers after contact, which is characteristic of contagious magic. There also seems to be an added dimension of promoting the group’s strength and unity; by requiring everyone in the cast to perform this bad-luck-warding behavior together, it reinforces the idea that the group is stronger together. Ultimately, I think this ritual is a perfect example of the multiplicity and variation that is often said to be a core component of folklore, and I would be interested to see if/how this ritual changes after its introduction to USC theater spaces.

Paper Plate Awards Ritual

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“This is called the paper plate awards. For every [theater] show two seniors would get paper plates, and with sharpies, for every single member of the cast, they would get their own individual ‘paper plate award.’ So on a paper plate they would write, like, um, for me it would say ‘C, 2022 paper plate awards for The Sound of Music’ and then it would say, like, ‘best mistress’ or whatever. Like- like it would be a very specific award that has to do with, like, an inside joke about the show or something that has happened at rehearsals, or something about your character you’re playing, or a funny line you have, and they would do some type of variation on that turned into the name of an award. And it was important because every single person got their own award, and every single person’s award was very specific to them. Like, no one got a generic award, everyone felt included and like they had a thing that like, that was their show or their little specialty. So it was meant to make everyone feel close and like- even though it was a joke awards, it was all meant to show that like everyone has contributions to, not just like the talent of the show, but like the community that we are like forming.

And so it was always the dinner before opening night, um, that is when the two seniors would do the award show and just present it to everyone. Um, and they would just go down the list and be like ‘we’re presenting this paper plate award for blah blah blah to blah blah blah.’ Um, and by the time I was a senior, since me and this one other girl were the two seniors who had been there the longest, we got to be the ones to make the paper plate awards and hold the ceremony. So it was something I got to see from being like, eleven years old as like a little kid to then growing up and being like the eighteen-year-old who’s doing it and passing it on.”

Context
C is a current student at the University of Southern California and grew up in Palm Desert, California. In addition to stating that it was the seniors who created the paper plate awards for everyone, C stated that the seniors got the role because they were in somewhat of a leadership role; having been there the longest also meant that the leading seniors knew the group the best. When asked what would happen if there were more than two seniors who had been there the longest, C described that they performed three shows a school year, so the seniors would be able to ‘trade off’ and each get a turn. C finished by saying she hopes to establish the paper plate awards tradition at some of her performance groups at USC because she feels it helps foster connection and belonging, even if someone is young or new to the group.

Analysis
As C pointed out during our interview, the main purpose of this ritual seems to be strengthening communal bonds through the special acknowledgment of the value of each group member. The silly tone of the awards and their references to inside jokes from the rehearsal process harkens back to forms of workplace humor, where teasing and getting ‘in’ on a certain joke designates someone as part of a group. That the paper plate awards take place over a shared meal adds a further sense of connectedness. C’s comment towards the end also indicates that the paper plates awards are a particularly special time for the seniors; after having received paper plate awards for numerous performances, stepping into the role of creating the paper plate awards functions as a kind of rite of passage that acknowledges the seniors’ leadership role and experience. Depending on how advertised the tradition is throughout the rehearsal process, it seems as though a new group member’s first paper plate awards could function as a sort of rite of passage by giving an award that makes them feel seen, and therefore, ‘part of the group.’