Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

Spirit Room

L is 54. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was in the Army in his 20s and now works in private personal security. He studied theology in college. He told me this story about his Haitian great grandmother in person.

“She was a big believer in spirits. When my great grandfather died, she moved out of the room they used to share and left the room exactly how he would like it and she said he would come and visit and stay in his room. You were allowed in the room… if you dared to stay in it. I can’t recall anyone ever staying in the room… (laughs) my uncle Glover actually ran out of the house because he said he saw my great grandfather there and for the next two nights we all slept in cars. No one else ever saw him but we all believed in it though.”

In the Voodoo religion, the spirits of the dead are believed to remain active in the affairs of the living. L said neither he nor his family was worried the great grandfather’s ghost would do anyone harm, they just “didn’t want to mess with it.” For more information, see http://www.haitiobserver.com/blog/after-life-beliefts-in-voodoo-religion.html. 

Birthday Beheading

G is 39 years old, he was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and moved to Los Angeles three years ago. He explained why he did not celebrate birthdays growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness in a conversation with me.

“I don’t know if this is a legend of a myth… I grew up a Jehovah’s Witness and we never celebrated birthdays, and the reason we never celebrated birthdays was because in the bible every time someone had a birthday… well my parents told me… and I never researched to see if it was true… but someone would die, or there would be a fire or get decapitated and I always wanted a birthday but I was afraid I would die or be decapitated on my birthday. I think the first birthday I celebrated… I was in college, and it was my 21st birthday, I went to school in Savannah and my friends took me out to River Street. I was not scared, I was actually really excited… by that time I knew people weren’t dying on their birthdays!”

The Jehovah’s Witness website gives a few reasons for not celebrating birthday. The main one seems to be because it is considered a pagan celebration and there is mention of only two birthdays in the bible; in Genesis 40: 20-22 There is a beheading and a birthday thrown by the Pharoah and in Mark 6: 20-21 another beheading on Herod’s birthday. https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/birthdays/

Hex Chicken

L is 54. He was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was in the Army in his 20s and now works in private personal security. He studied theology in college. He told me this story about his Haitian great grandmother in person.

“My great grandma Hattie, on my dad’s side, um… she used to practice a form of Haitian voodoo like if she disliked someone in the community… they lived in Turle, Arkansas… she would take chickens and drain their blood and bury the chicken head and curse you, like in the yard and if she wanted you to change your behavior she would do this ritual… mind you we ate the chicken after she used it for the ritual. We called it voodoo… we hardly understood what she said because she had a heavy accent and I didn’t spend a whole lotta time with her because there’s not a lot to do in Turle, Arkansas. She came from Haiti in the 1930s or something and married my great grandfather in Arkansas… they were sharecroppers… so yea… if she had an issue with you she would perform her hex.”

Ritual sacrifice is common in Voodoo and other religions. Cooking and eating the sacrificed animal is also a common practice. For more information on Voodoo with a focus on how the religion has been misconstrued and misrepresented, particularly by Western Media, see FERÈRE, GÉRARD A. “HAITIAN VOODOO: ITS TRUE FACE.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 3/4, 1978, pp. 37–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40793401. Accessed 25 Apr. 2022.

Secret Santa, but make it competitive

C is 32, he was born in Visalia, California. He grew up with a foster family in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He told me about his foster family’s take on secret Santa.

“There was a family tradition I had with my foster family… every Thanksgiving we would put names in a hat and we would draw names on Thanksgiving and it’s like secret Santa… and we buy that person a gift… whoever’s name we got… and everyone would try and guess who got who and if they guess the person that drew their name, they could have their gift but if they didn’t they would have to wait until Christmas Eve. It got really competitive (laughs)”

Secret Santa is widely credited in America to a philanthropist named Larry Dean Stewart. Stewart struggled in his younger years, and reportedly was giving help and hope by the generous contributions of strangers at low points in his life. When he became a millionaire in the cable and telephone business, he decided to “pay it forward” by handing out $100 bills and large anonymous cash donations (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15751409). Secret Santa, however, is a tradition that goes back much further. One Scandinavian tradition known as Julklapp, involves throwing presents into people’s doorways and running away after knocking (https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Julklapp). Around the world, other anonymous gift traditions exist around various holidays, like Amigo Secreto or Angelito on Valentine’s Day in Latin Countries (https://blog.willamette.edu/worldnews/2010/02/22/amigo-secreto/).

The Devil is Spitting on your Food

T is 20 years old, his parents immigrated from Bangladesh, he was born in Sylmar, California. He told me about this belief about why you should cover your food if you walk away from your plate.

“Whenever you have food out… if you walk away from your food… basically the devil is spitting on your food, so you always need to cover your food. This is a Muslim, Islamic tradition… and you do it whenever you’re eating but also during Ramadan, which is the month of fasting, we break our fast when the sun sets, right… so what we do is we set the table with the food we’re gonna break our fast with… so we do our prayers before we eat while the sun is setting… so we break our fast with a date and some water and then we go pray formally… because we have to pray five times a day… so we say one of the five prayers and we have to cover our food and after we finish with the prayer then we can eat.”

This website explains the hadith, or statement from the prophet, of covering food, https://www.understanding-islam.com/hadith-regarding-covering-food-during-the-night/, stating that covering food is to avoid disease. The link between the devil’s spit and pestilence is straightforward. For general information about spitting and the devil in Islam, see https://www.opindia.com/2021/03/the-significance-of-spitting-in-islam-how-spitting-can-ward-off-satan/