Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

Outside Clothes and Inside Clothes; Keep your House Clean

Nationality: Black American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: Friday April 22nd, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

M is a 20-year-old black female. 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: I’m really good at absorbing other people’s superstitions. My best friend from high school though that, ’cause she’s from Brazil, and her mother said like if you brought, like wore street clothes on your bed, that you would like bring like disorder to you life as well as to your bed because it was like dirty. Um, and so, like she would always like give me pajamas to wear like if I was to going to like, even if I wasn’t staying over, but like if I was goig to be at her house for a while or I had to do homework at her desk or like sit like on a beanbag chair like I was not allowed to like touch her bed unless I was like not in street clothes. She doesn’t either, like she does not sit on her bed unless she has taken off her jeans.

Me: Like you have to be in nice clothes or?

M: No, so like whatever you wore outside is dirty, so you have to wear stuff that you only wear inside, and so she like only wears her pajamas inside in the same way, like she would never go outside in sweatpants because then your not dirty clothes are dirty.

Me: That’s so much work though. To change every time you come home and leave.

M: I mean like, but if you grew up in it you just would never wear, like she also has like sweats that she would wear to the gym, and then she has pajamas.

Me: Ok.

M: And then her pajamas are meant for inside, and her sweats for the gym are meant for outside, as well as her other outside clothes.

Me: Alright, that makes more sense. But, so, do you do that? Or no?

M: No, that one is irritating. But I would always follow it when I was in her home ’cause obviously I didn’t want to be disrespectful but I, um, don’t think that I, like there’s so much disorder in my life already, a little more dirt is not going to change things. But there’s just a lot of things that I adapt into my life.

M describes an everyday cultural practice that she was introduced to by a friend who’s family follows it. The tradition seems to be specific to Brazil, but might be attributed to the culture of different nations as well. Unlike the Japanese tradition of not stepping on thresholds that she adopted and now follows still as an adult, she only follows this practice in the people’s homes who do follow the custom. It seems that M only adopts the cultural practice that she has learned when they could quite possibly effect the people around her in a negative way.

Adopted Japanese Custom

Nationality: Black American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: Friday April 22nd, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

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: I actually adopt everyone else’s superstitions. Like if someone’s like oh, like… Well there’s actually one.

Me: Ok.

M: So I went to a, like the Natural History Museum in Peabody which is outside of Boston which has like a remodeled traditional Japanese house from like the 1940’s, um, and when you walk through it like the guy always tells you not to step on the threshold because it like brings demons into the house, um, and for for whatever reason I’ve, it’s not that I believe in demons, but I also now refuse to step on thresholds of homes and it really irritates my family because when we are all coming home from the grocery store and we have to get into the house quickly I must step over (the threshold) and they’re like ‘can you not suck?’ But it’s only, it’s like the threshold of like the main door of the house, is like especially bad, but then also the threshold of any door is bad, but that’s also why like most, like sometimes in the old Japanese homes at least there were thresholds like built in to the doorways so like when we have doors now, there’s like, it’s just the floor, but in the traditional Japanese home there’s like a threshold, so like a bump under each door, and basically it’s similar to like “don’t step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

Me:  So do you do that too then?

M: God no. That would be so hard. But it’s like the same thing, like you bring demons into your mother’s home and it’s bad, like demons are bad. But yeah, I don’t do it (step on thresholds) now.

It’s interesting how something learned during an educational endeavor, and something seemingly irrelevant to the informants life turned into a daily practice for her. Even though she is not connected to the culture that the custom hails from, nor does she believe in the superstition, that stepping on a threshold of a door would allow demons to enter someone’s house,  she adopted the practice anyway. Customs migrate so easily now, especially in the United States which is so culturally diverse as well as with the travel that people do. These practices travel so fast that some people who observe such customs do not even know the reasons and the history for why such traditions exist.

Birth Plans Jinx the Actual Birth

Nationality: American
Age: 55
Occupation: Nurse
Residence: Tulsa, OK
Performance Date: March 15th, 2016
Primary Language: English

The informant is my mother, Dayna Rayburn, born in 1960 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She grew up in Tulsa, before going to college at the University of Oklahoma and graduating with a degree in nursing. She has worked at St. Francis Hospital in the newborn nursery for thirty years.

In this piece, my mother talks about how she feels “birth plans”, or when the parents think they know more than the nurse, will jinx the birth of the baby.

Mom: One last nursing thing I thought of.

Me: Okay.

Mom: In the past few years, some expectant parents have done research on the internet and have downloaded these “birth plans” which indicate their preference on labor, mobility, hydration, and nourishment, monitoring, pain relief, augmentation, which is what they want to do to speed up labor…

Me: Like, literally?

Mom: No, like distraction.

Me: Got it.

Mom: The birth plans basically just include things about what they want. Inevitably, things never go as planned. Either the moms require a C-section, the mom and or the baby do not tolerate labor or the baby has to go to the neonatal intensive care nursery, which is where the sick babies go.

Me: That’s where you used to work.

Mom: Yes, but then I left because it was too sad. Is that okay to say?

Me: Yes, yes.

Mom: Okay, but yeah. Nurses believe that the birth plan jinxes the mom and baby because the delivery never goes as planned. It’s kind of like life: you think it’s going one way and then it comes and changes everything. All nurses think the birth plans sets the moms up for feelings of failures. Nobody can plan what will happen for sure with labor and delivery. There’s just too many variables.

My mother, especially in her profession, does not like it when someone talks about nothing have gone wrong, or anticipates that nothing will go wrong. She always wants people to be prepared for anything, which is what you have to do when you’re working as a nurse. These parents coming into the hospital believing their child’s birth will go smoothly obviously irks my mother, as she thinks they have jinxed themselves and, most importantly, their child. I know this also bothers my mom on a different level, as she hates it when her patients think they know better than her. After working as a neo-natal nurse for thirty years, she hates being told by a twenty four year old what is going to happen.

Talking About Nightmares

Nationality: American
Age: 55
Occupation: Nurse
Residence: Tulsa, OK
Performance Date: March 15th, 2016
Primary Language: English

The informant is my mother, Dayna Rayburn, born in 1960 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She grew up in Tulsa, before going to college at the University of Oklahoma and graduating with a degree in nursing. She has worked at St. Francis Hospital in the newborn nursery for thirty years.

In this piece, my mom discusses the practice of not talking about your dreams before breakfast, and gives some explanation as for why we do it.

Mom: Do you remember when I would say “don’t talk about dreams before breakfast”.

Me: Yes, but why don’t you say where you heard that.

Mom: I think it was my grandmother. She must have told my mom, and I remember one day when I was really little I ran into the kitchen where my mom was and told her I had a bad dream. Before she would let me talk about my dream, she made me sit down and eat something. I think it was a banana. It didn’t have to be a full course meal: just something little.

Me: Why couldn’t you talk about your dreams before breakfast?

Mom: I don’t know. My mom just always said it was bad luck. It might be an old Indian thing. She heard it from her grandma, like I said.

Me: So why do you follow it?

Mom: I guess I believe in it? I think it’s just a nice thing to do, whether or not it stops bad luck. I think it calms you down. When I went into the kitchen, I was probably running. I still do it to this day, and I know I’ve told you and Alyssa about it.

Me: Yeah, I’ve even told Allen [my roommate] and a few other people about it. They’ll send me a text saying “I just had the worst dream” and I’ll reply back “Have you had breakfast yet?”

Mom: [laughs] They probably think you’re crazy.

Me: I mean, yeah.

Mom: Just tell them that your mom does it.

Me: I’m sure that will help.

This is an interesting belief my mom has, because we both believe in it without really knowing why we do it. I think we do it because we think we’ll be so worked up after waking up from the nightmare that we’ll just worry and put more stress on ourselves. In order to combat that, my mom tells me to eat something. This gives me time to calm down and think rationally about whatever my nightmare was, and remind myself that it was only a dream. I think the reason why we’re told to eat something is because eating is usually one of the first things we do in the morning, and it takes a bit longer than brushing your teeth, which means we have a longer period of time to cool down.

Palm Cross – Palm Sunday

Nationality: American- Irish and Jewish Lineage
Age: 50
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Pacific Palisades, CA
Performance Date: 4-20-16
Primary Language: English

Informant: Tracy McGeagh is my mother and was born with the name Mara Tracy Weiss. She is now 50 years old and lives in Pacific Palisades, California. She was raised in Malibu, California and in Santa Monica, California and went to College at UCLA. She got her Law Degree after she graduated college and practice Family law for many years and still does briefly today. Her mother’s side of the family is from Wales, with Irish- Catholic heritage and her Father is Jewish, with Hungarian blood. She was not raised practicing either of the two religions, but celebrated both Catholic and Jewish holidays. Later in life she decided to be confirmed as Catholic and not practice her Jewish roots. She had 3 children who she helped raise as Catholic as well.

Tracy: “On Palm Sunday, when you receive the palms that are given out, you make them into a cross shape out of respect for Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. You fold the cross over itself and tie it at the center. After you make the cross, since the palms were blessed, you can keep it in your room or your car to keep God close by.”

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Palm Sunday is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic faith, which means it is a day that is required to attend Church. The reason this day is important is because it is the day that Jesus entered into Jerusalem on the week of his death, knowing that he was going to be crucified before it happened. It is the beginning of Holy Week, which includes: Holy Thursday (The Last Supper), Good Friday (The Day Jesus Died), Holy Saturday (A Day of Waiting), and Easter Sunday (The Day of Jesus’s Resurrection). The ritual at Mass on Palm Sunday is that many palms are processed in, as they were when Jesus entered Jerusalem on the Donkey, and later these palms are blessed. They are distributed to those in the congregation, and the remaining palms are burned for the next year’s Ash Wednesday (another day of holy obligation). Forming the palms into a cross is a custom that my mother was taught by her Parish in Pacific Palisades and has also witnessed in numerous other parishes over the country. The practice was passed down to me and my siblings and is also practiced by my friends who are Catholic.

Personally, I think this craft is quite nice. It is a way to make the palms into and item that would want to be kept and demonstrated. It is also, used as a way to remember the reason for the Catholic faith and can be used as an item for prayer. Keeping it in one’s room or car is a custom that allows for the believer to feel the presence and protection of God on a daily basis, something that is nothing but valuable.