Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Haldi Doodh- “Golden Milk”

Nationality: United States
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Language: English

Text: “Whenever I get sick, like with even a cold or just a runny nose, my mom will always make me haldi doodh. It’s warm milk mixed with turmeric, black pepper, and honey. She heats the milk then stirs in the spices and has me drink it before I go to bed. She always tells me how her mom gave her the same tea and now she has the privilege of doing the same for me. It has a weird earthy taste but it always helps and I start to feel better the next day.”

Context: This element of folk medicine was shared by the informant, D during a conversation about home remedies passed down through generations. D explained that whenever she is sick her mother will make haldi-doodh, also known as “golden milk”. This remedy comes from Indian tradition and is passed down through generations, with D’s mother having learned it from her own mom. While it has a strong earthy taste, D associates it with comfort and feeling better the next day. 

Analysis: This is an example of folk medicine passed through generations, emphasizing both cultural continuity and caregiving. Haldi doodh is both a physical remedy and a symbolic act of love and care. The turmeric, black pepper and honey that are used are tied to traditional Ayurvedic beliefs that view food as not just nutrition, but also as powerful medicine. Given that this remedy is always given before bed, it is also a comforting ritual. This practice shows how folk medicine not only physically heals but also acts as a vessel for expressing love across generations.

Banging Pots and Pans on New Years 

Nationality: Mexican-Filipino American
Age: 22
Occupation: Engineer
Residence: Irvine, CA
Language: English

Text

“Every New Year’s Eve, right when the clock strikes midnight, my family rushes outside and we start banging on pots and pans like our lives depend on it. It’s loud, chaotic, and silly if you are a neighbor watching next door.

We don’t do this tradition just to make noise for fun, we are scaring away bad spirits. My Lola would say, ‘Make it so loud the malas (bad luck) can’t follow us into the New Year.” i feel like this tradition is not about silence and reflection. It’s more about being loud, communal, and kind of joyful. It shakes things up and clears space for something better.

Every year, no matter where I am, I find something to bang. When I’m not at home, I’ll use a cup and spoon if need be. Because for me, the noise is more than just a tradition. It is a way of saying that we made it to a new year and that we should chase bad spirits away and welcome what is to come next.”

Context 

The informant reflects on a recurring family ritual: banging pots and pans at midnight on New Year’s Eve to ward off bad luck. She traces the tradition to her lola (grandmother) and describes how this action has remained central to her family’s New Year’s celebration.

The informant highlighted how rituals passed down through generations become markers of cultural identity even when performed in different settings from where her grandmother originally would do this to where her family does it now.

My interpretation 

From a folklore perspective, banging pots and pans on New Year’s Eve functions as a protective folk belief ritual that’s aligned with what James Frazer termed magic superstitions. In this case it would be conversion magic where action is required to prevent misfortune. The practice is not institutionally religious but it operates within a system of vernacular spirituality and community belief that’s passed down through generations in domestic spaces.

The ritual also fits within a life cycle of belief systems surrounding transitions and thresholds like what Victor Turner would call a liminal moment. The striking of the pots is part of a ritual of noise that marks and manages a cosmic shift. Symbolically, the sound disorients evil, clears spiritual residue from the old year, and prepares the household for prosperity.

This ritual functions as both cultural preservation and performance of identity. It’s an informal act of heritage that resists assimilation by rooting the celebrant in a shared memory and practice.

Adventist Communion Bread

Nationality: American
Age: 55
Occupation: Marriage & Family Therapist
Residence: Forest Falls, CA
Language: English

Text:

JB: “There’s a recipe for making Seventh-day Adventist communion bread, and there’s a tradition that whatever you don’t use, you’re supposed to take it outside and burn it. I think that some churches still do this – I don’t actually know. It’s supposed to be whole grain flour, salt, water, and oil. I think that because it’s been blessed, it shouldn’t be used for any purpose other than communion. I think it’s an Adventist tradition. And the recipe for the bread, I think it’s… you can either do part whole wheat flour and white flour or you can do all whole wheat flour. And then.. I don’t know the precise amounts but some salt, some water and some oil. And then you want it to be a pretty firm dough, you roll it out. A lot of times people will kind of score it and then bake it till it’s firm.”

Context:

Informant JB was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, which is a branch of Protestant Christianity that is distinct for its dietary restrictions and emphasis on the Sabbath. For Adventists, communion is a symbolic act of consuming the body (as unleavened bread) and blood (as grape juice — Adventists typically do not consume alcohol) of Jesus to commemorate his crucifixion. JB suggested that the tradition of burning leftover communion bread because according to the Bible, Christ’s body did not decay in the tomb.

Analysis:

The ritual preparation and burning of the unleavened bread reflects the church’s intentions to set apart the bread as sacred. Sometimes the leftover grape juice is also poured out. Interestingly, these acts are considered grave sins in the Catholic church, as the bread and wine which are blessed during Mass are believed to be literal manifestations of Christ’s body and blood. Leftover Eucharist is typically consumed by the priest or dissolved in water and disposed of in a respectful manner. This reversal of meaning reflects the broader Protestant departure from Catholic beliefs as well as the particular bias in the Adventist community against the Catholic church. Overall, this tradition points to the nature of reactionary movements in the history of religion as well as performances of sacredness in religious communities.

How to cure a cold (with optimism)

Nationality: American
Age: 59
Occupation: Psychology Professor
Residence: Forest Falls, CA
Language: English

Text:

“My cure to the cold is to drink lots of fluids, like tea, and to have an optimistic mental attitude. I synthesized this from drinking lots of fluids being good for you and tea kind of being a good warm…. like tea, so warm fluids being good, and the… I can’t remember where it is… and a combination of the Bible, in Proverbs or wherever it is, and kind of the medical stuff like… I don’t know. It seems like you can release endorphins, I don’t know if ‘endorphins’ is the right thing, but it seems like you can fight off infections that way. So I just put this stuff together and thought that you could have this optimistic attitude to fight off what’s coming. But it seems to me like it only works at the tipping point, like it could be right at the balance. But once you’re sick, you’re sick.”

Context:

Informant KB is a highly educated individual and has a background of studying psychology and religion. He was also raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, which is distinct for its emphasis on health and dietary restrictions. Despite general anti-science and anti-evolution tendencies in the Adventist church, KB is an adamant believer in synthesizing his faith with the findings and practices of the scientific community. As for Biblical references, KB may be referring to Proverbs 17:22, which reads, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”

Analysis:

Cures to the common cold are numerous and variable, especially because there is currently no institutionally recognized cure. KB’s hypothesis is representative of the nature of folklore as “might be right” knowledge. KB draws on his background in psychology, citing the potential healing power of endorphins in response to a positive mindset. However, this particular cure implies that if one does not succeed in being optimistic enough, they are responsible for their own fall into illness. This may or may not intentionally parallel the common Christian view that if one does not take responsibility for their ‘sinful’ human nature, they are responsible for their eternal damnation.

Baseball Curses

Nationality: American

Occupation: Student

Residence: San Diego, CA

Text:
“There are tons of curses in baseball but the two main ones are the Curse of the Billy Goat and the Curse of the Bambino. The Curse of the Billy Goat was placed on the Chicago Cubs after a man brought his pet goat to Wrigley for a world series game. The goat was annoying the fans sitting around him so security very reasonably tried to kick the guy and his goat out. This enraged the man, who declared that the Cubs would never win the World Series ever again. It took 108 years but the Cubs finally broke the curse in 2016. The other major curse is the curse of the Bambino, which happened to the Boston Red Sox after they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. It’s impossible to know why they would even consider trading the greatest player ever to their arch rivals, and after making the trade in 1920 they didn’t win the World Series until 2004.”

Context:

My friend described both of these curses as if they were fact, which he later justified by saying that there’s no way a team could go 108 years without winning a World Series unless they had been cursed. In general my friend takes a very analytical approach to baseball, and he is very interested in advanced statistics and sabermetrics, which made it more surprising he would accept superstition as fact. He said that the baseball community overall accepts both of these curses as being real, undeniable things that happened. When I asked him more about this he brought up multiple incidents that were “proof” that the curses were real. For the Red Sox he mentioned the Bucky F. Dent incident, where the worst hitter on the Yankees hit a home run to eliminate the Red Sox, and the Bill Buckner incident where a horrible error by the Red Sox’s first baseman allowed the Mets to beat the Red Sox in the World Series. For the Cubs he mentioned the Steve Bartman incident, where a Cubs fan interfered with play which led to a late inning meltdown eliminating the Cubs from the playoffs. Despite my friend being focused on the analytical, statistically backed aspects of baseball he firmly believes that these curses are real.

Analysis:

Like my friend, I am also interested in statistics. Out of curiosity I calculated the odds of a team going 108 years without winning a World Series because on the surface that feels like an impossibly long drought. Surprisingly, the odds of any one team not winning over a 108 year stretch is 57%, meaning that it is more likely than not for a team to suffer that long of a drought. This statistical quirk, combined with the incidents my friend listed when I questioned him, reveal a lot about how superstitions form. First, it feels impossible for a team to go 108 years without winning (even though the opposite is true), which leads to people questioning how that can happen. This leads to a theory being formed, in this case the theory being that these teams are cursed. Once the theory is formed, confirmation bias leads to random events being attributed to the curse. So many superstitions spawn from a desire to have a better understanding of the world, and in this case the superstitions appeared out of a desire to understand counterintuitive statistics.