Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

St. Nicholas Day

Nationality: German/American
Age: 22
Occupation: USC Student
Residence: USC off campus
Performance Date: April 13, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: German

My good friend and roommate, the informant, is half German. Her father was born and raised in Germany and her mother is American. The two met while her mother was in Germany and moved to the United States after they married. She is their only child. Her father still has a thick German accent and speaks German with her; she speaks the language fluently and still has family who live in Germany. She lived there from ages 1-3 and then decided last year to study abroad in Berlin. I talked to her about Germany and asked if there are any traditions that she can remember participating in while she lived there.

Informant: “I might butcher some of the details because I don’t remember everything, but on the 5th of December at night, children put their shoes outside of their door for St. Nikolaus, and he comes in the night and fills all of the children’s shoes with coins and um… clementines, and things like that. And you wake up on the 6th with stuff in your shoes. If you were good, it’s basically your reward. If you’re good, you get that, if you’re bad…you get a stick. At least that is how they celebrate in Germany.”

She describes this to me as we sit on my bed. She says it is basically the same thing as Santa Claus in a lot of ways. I think it sounds magical. I love everything to do with Christmas so I love hearing stories about other cultural festive traditions surrounding the holiday and December in general.

Skating “Five-0”

Nationality: White
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brea California
Performance Date: April 29, 2015
Primary Language: English

Tanner is a student at USC and one of my closest friends. He grew up in Brea California, on the boarder of Orange Country. He was a part of both soccer, skate, and fishing communities as a kid, as well as the public school community and his local community.

 

Performance: “So we’re at the skate park, and everybody has to wear helmets at the skate park – it’s the law. obviously we’re all skating and nobody is wearing helmets because… come on. haha. So we will all be skating and somebody is sitting at the top and all of a sudden you will hear somebody yell “Five-0!” And then you hear it and everybody panics and then runs to the bleachers and acts like they aren’t skating. I mean you say Five-0 because of the whole Hawaii Five-0 thing, and obviously the cops are showing up, and if you’re skating around and you don’t have a helmet on you get like a $200 ticket…which is like…not chill.”

Do you think that’s just a thing in Brea (where he is from) or do you think that’s a larger skate community thing? i asked.

“I mean i’ve been to other skate parks in like Chino and Santa Anna and people will yell Five-0 and the exact same thing happens. so yeah, I guess you could say it’s a bigger thing. One time though I was skating in Palmdale and yelled it and everybody thought I meant somebody was getting arrested and got really sketched out. I guess it means different things sometimes.”

 

Analysis: I believe that this skate folklore has both multiplicity and variation. As I never skated when I was younger, I had never heard of this warning call. It’s like a sort of code to say that cops are nearby without notifying the cops that the kids know. It is interesting that Tanner referenced a potential cause for the saying, the TV series Hawaii Five-0. The saying seems to sometimes mean different things in different skating communities but always has something to do with the police.

 

Creole Recipe

Nationality: American
Age: 61
Occupation: Small Business Owner
Residence: Orange, CA
Performance Date: 3/14/15
Primary Language: English
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Photo of gumbo recipe that my dad, Brad Perrin, emailed to himself.

 

When asking my dad if he had any family recipes or ritualistic traditions in his family, he brought my sister and I together and revealed this gumbo recipe to us and wanted to make sure we had copies of it so we could teach our kids about it someday. My dad first learned this recipe from his mother when he was in his late teens. He didn’t have any female siblings, so it was his responsibility to ensure this family gumbo recipe survived. His mother was an amazing cook and loved cooking Southern dishes for their family, with this gumbo dish being made on special occasions such as birthdays and holidays. My dad was excited to learn this recipe from his mom when he was in his late teens because it meant him being fully connected with his roots and being able to pass on the recipe which has been in my family for supposedly at least five generations. He said it was supposedly created by my great great grandma in Algiers, Louisiana.

I loved knowing that I am now responsible for carrying on the tradition, as my family doesn’t have many cultural traditions. It makes me feel closer to my ancestors and also allows me to learn more about Southern culture which formed the basis of my family’s identity for many generations.

“Off the Bricks”

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: April 20, 2014
Primary Language: English

The informant learned the phrase “off the bricks” during her time as an intern at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Summer Seminar. A brick pathway led to the theater at which the performances took place, so the interns were taught to keep any talk regarding the performances “off the brick [path]” and away from the theater to prevent influencing any potential audience members’ perspectives before watching the show.

As far as the informant knew, no official punishments were administered for failing to adhere to the motto. Rather the phrase served more as a reminder to members, both old and new. Something to keep in mind, as with all mottos and proverbs, are the implications that follow from these phrases. Advice crafted to ensure that audience perspectives are not altered indicate that audiences may have been impacted by comments they overheard from employees. Teasing this out a bit further, the measures taken to prevent such occurrences illuminate that audience perspective purity is of a high value in the theatrical community. Rather than allowing those involved in the process of creating a piece dictate, whether intentionally or not, the community aims to preserve the audience’s first encounter with the production as purely their own and unique to each person.

“Tuck-ins” at UCSD

Nationality: Asian-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: University of California at San Diego
Performance Date: April 26, 2014
Primary Language: English

The “ceremony”:

When a member of a fraternity or a sorority wants to pick up a “little sibling” of the opposite gender, the little is called a “tuck in.” In order to legitimize the act, the *families of both the member and the prospective “tuck-in” come together on a designated night to properly “tuck him/her in.” The older members select a story-book (the informant used Green, Eggs, and Ham as her example) and a word that is both unique and recurring in the text (i.e. “green” or “ham”). The older sibling would then begin reading the selected story, and every time the selected word within the story comes  up, the prospective tuck-in must take a shot of a predesignated hard alcohol. As the night goes on and the tuck-in gets more and more inebriated, he or she must also play games in demonstrating his or her lack of sobriety. For example, she might be asked to give a nick name to every other member present at the event, and then remember all the nicknames; for each mistake, he or she must take another shot. The objective of the ritual, of course, is to legitimize the union of the siblings through severe drunkenness.

*Each new member of a sorority of a fraternity is assigned to a “heritage” of preceding members. While there are no “parents” there are brothers and sisters, which carry down the line as grand-big-sisters/brothers (shortened to “grandbigs”).

Analysis:

The informant, herself, being a member of Theta at UCSD had gotten tucked in when she was a sophomore, when she was 20 years old.

Collector: Why do you think you guys do it?

Informant: Well…I think it’s just welcome new members into another community, I mean it’s college so yeah…the drinking.

Collector: Why are they called tuck-ins?

Informant: I have no idea. Maybe it has to do with tucking the members in to the group, but I don’t know why anyone would pick the words “tucking in” to describe something that could just as easily be called…like integrating or something. (chuckles)

While the notion of families in the Greek community is not unique to UCSD, what I do find interesting is precisely what the informant was touching on in her last comment. It does seem curious that such a specific phrase would be used, and frankly the first image that comes to mind, particularly because of the play on the family dynamic, relates to the phallus. Perhaps “to tuck in” first surfaced as an innuendo to describe the consummation of a new union. Regardless similar traditions exist in Greek communities at other schools. Here at USC, for example, the process of taking a little sibling of the opposite gender also exists, though they’re simply referred to as “little bros/sisters (according to gender, of course).”

Something else in the process worth noting would be the story-book – again, an example of a play on home life. The prospective older sibling reads the story, analogous to how a parent reads a bed time story as he or she “tucks in” the child. However, this particular ritual only takes place in the event that the older and younger siblings are of opposite genders, so I maintain the hypothesis that the phrase “tuck-in” may very well extend beyond the innocent connotations associations of a parent tucking in a child. After all, this is college. This is NOT, however, to say that any kind of sexual violence takes place; rather it is simply speculation of the phrase etymology.