Category Archives: general

Twelve grapes under the table before New Year

Context

Originating in Spain, the tradition of eating grapes at the stroke of midnight is believed to welcome good fortune and prosperity in the new year. The custom began back in the late 1800s but was popularized in the early 1900s when farmers in the Alicante area produced an overabundant harvest and needed a way to increase grape sales. As the sweet tradition goes, you’re supposed to eat the grapes one at a time at each clock’s chime. If you can finish all 12 grapes within a minute, you’ll see luck, success, and positive energy in the new year.

Content

The informant recalled how she and her three sisters would go under the table and eat 12 grapes before midnight on New Year’s. They would imagine the success they wanted while eating the grapes. She knew it was not likely it would work, but she didn’t want to take the risk of not eating the grapes and not getting the luck for the new year. She also said it was a fun tradition connecting her to her sisters. When her sister got proposed to, they all blamed it on the grapes. 

Analysis

This tradition blends superstition and emotional bonding. As Appadurai (1988) the text suggests that this tradition’s origins can reveal how economic practices can become cultural customs. It is not a necessity because they believe in it, but they fear the consequences of not participating in the tradition. The grapes become a symbolic ritual that, like in Bruner’s (2001) work, creates shared meaning and family intimacy, especially among the sisters, who use the tradition to frame events like marriage as fateful.

California Lemon Ritual: Visiting Family On The East Coast

Nationality: American
Age: 63
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Alameda, California

Informant Information

Age: 63

Date of Performance: 2/18/2025

Language: English

Nationality: American

Occupation: Retired

Primary Language: English

Residence: Alameda, California

Text

“If you grew up in California and all your family lives on the East Coast, you grow a lemon tree. When you visit family there, you bring lemons because it’s very exotic because you can’t grow lemons on the East Coast. You put them in a bag and then pack them in your suitcase. Eventually, some family members began visiting us on the West Coast when they got older, and they’d pick their own lemons from our lemon tree. I have a lemon tree in my backyard as a present for my husband because he’s from the South, and you also can’t grow lemons there.”

Context

The informant was born and raised in California, while her extended family remained on the East Coast. Her parents were originally from the East Coast, and she made frequent visits throughout her life. As part of those visits, she carried a seemingly simple but meaningful gift — fresh California lemons. This act became ritualized within her family, rooted in the regional differences in agriculture and climate. Lemons, while technically possible to grow in parts of the East and South, are far more common and thriving in California’s mild climate. In colder or more humid regions, lemon trees are vulnerable to environmental damage and rarely flourish.

For her family, receiving these lemons symbolized a piece of California, a vibrant, fragrant token of the West Coast lifestyle. When family members later visited her in California, they cherished the opportunity to pick lemons from her tree themselves. The ritual became a two-way cultural exchange, a reflection of rootedness and connection to place. Later, she planted a lemon tree in her own backyard as a housewarming gift to her Southern-born husband, making the tree not only a familial tradition but also a personal and romantic gesture.

Analysis

This lemon-gifting ritual illustrates how everyday items can carry deep cultural and emotional meaning, especially across geographic boundaries. What begins as a practical act of bringing fresh produce to family transforms into a ritual that marks identity, nostalgia, and care. The lemon tree functions as a living symbol of California, and its fruit becomes a physical expression of home, warmth, and abundance.

The act of transporting lemons across coasts shows the significance of regional differences in agricultural production while also emphasizing how natural resources can become symbolic commodities in family relationships. The ritual communicates more than just gift-giving. It speaks to the longing for home, the pride in one’s origin, and the desire to share that with loved ones who live far away. Furthermore, the informant’s continuation of the tradition by planting her own tree and offering it as a gift to her husband reflects how rituals evolve to include new meanings. The lemon tree is now both a bridge to her past and a symbol of unity in her marriage, showing how folklore adapts to new contexts while preserving its emotional roots.

Korean-American Lunar New Year

“Oh, I say [happy new year to my grandmother in Korean] and bow before her on Lunar New Year. Then my mom makes all of the traditional ‘New Year Korean food’ and we eat well.” 

Lunar New Year looks different across the many countries that celebrate. It’s also quite different for those who celebrate in America. My boyfriend had told me how him and his Korean-American family celebrate the Korean Lunar New Year. He told me that he doesn’t know a lot of the tradition other than eating a lot of the traditional Korean food and bowing before his elders. He also mentioned that it’s a lot more popular among people and online now. He said that when he was younger, he feels like no one knew what a Korean person was much less knew about their culture. Nowadays, everyone knows a lot more about the culture and especially about Lunar New Year; almost more than he knows himself. 

As someone who is actively learning Korean, I think it is interesting to see my knowledge compared to my Korean-American boyfriend’s knowledge. A lot of times, I come back to him mentioning some things and he would either be clueless or ask me to elaborate so he can also learn. The first instance this happened was when I first told him that I learned about the Korean Lunar Year in class. We had learned how to say happy new year, ate a lot of the snacks that they eat at that time, and also looked at a presentation on what Korean people usually do in the day and what food they eat. My boyfriend had known some of the food and snacks that I mentioned, but I remember him saying that his mom wouldn’t normally make that food for this family when this event happened. After learning about how this event was celebrated this specific way in my class, I was curious about how all Korean-Americans celebrate, especially with being in LA, one of the biggest Korean-American cities in America. It makes me think about the traditions developed in the states and how similar these Korean-American traditions are to the Korean ones. 

La Cariñosa

“We do this dance to celebrate our Filipino culture and to show our heritage to others.”

La Cariñosa is a dance from the Maria Clara suite (Philippine dances that originated from Spanish culture). The name of the dance is loosely translated to “loving” or “affectionate.” This partner dance utilizes fans and handkerchiefs and is meant to simulate a courtship or romance between a couple. The person I had interviewed is the one that coordinated the dance for USC’s 2025 Pilipino American Cultural Night (PACN). She had emphasized that it is important to learn about the origins of the dance, so we can have intention behind our movements.

I appreciate this person I interviewed because she believes that it is very important to know the history of the dance before we perform it. By understanding the origin, us performers are able to connect more deeply with the dance and tell the story through our intention and movement. The person I interviewed helped me realize that these dances aren’t just a way to entertain our audience and share our culture but also a way to educate ourselves as the performers and preserve our heritage.

Competitive Pokémon Hax Chants

RF has been playing competitive Pokemon for years, starting with the folkier Smogon (singles 1v1) formats before transitioning to the official Video Game Competition (VGC) format in recent years.

The Text

Pokemon differs from most other turn-based games in that turns aren’t taken independently one after another but rather decisions for a particular turn are made from both players blind (like in game theory) and resolved simultaneously once all decisions are made. Because of this wait time, players are held in suspense after making a decision or even while making a decision, running through probabilities and the different possibilities the turn might resolve. As the game also employs an incredible amount random number generation (RNG), luck becomes a huge element in how a particular game turns out. Much of the game revolves around accounting for best and worst case scenario and, at time, betting on small odds in desperation. This lends itself to chants and prayers for good luck between turns while waiting for a turn to resolve.

The most common chants to shout are “Freeze” (referring to usually a 10% chance to render the opponent to be unable to act until they hit another 10% chance), “Flinch” (referring to the higher chance of rendering an opponent unable to act for the turn), “Dodge” (referring to the chance for an opponent’s attack to miss), and sometimes, as the informant explains that most competitive players are also “degenerate weebs,” “Chance Ball” (referring to the anime Haikyuu!! in referrence to an opportunity to score, or in the context of Pokemon, turn the momentum of the game in their favor).

“Deserved” is also sometimes said when RNG befalls an opponent “post-ironically” as the players know they’re “victim-blaming” the opponent, but also they sincerely mean it, or at least tongue-in-cheek do. Another variation is to say that the opponent was asking for it by putting themselves in a position to be haxed (the term for bad RNG happening to you, derived from “hax” which is a noun referring to the occurence of RNG-based effects.

This leads to the informant’s report of the rising sentiment in the community that luck is partially a skill to the degree that maximizing your odds of getting lucky or minimizing your odds of being haxed is a core skill of playing the game. When a player purposefully makes a play relying on hax in an attempt to turn around an otherwise unwinnable game, that can be somewhat respectable as “playing to your outs” while players who get hax on their side unintentionally are “lucky and bad” for “getting bailed.”

Spectators will join in a lot, rooting for their teammate or friend, but actual players don’t usually do so, only when desperate and no other obvious plays can be made. Naturally, this is because doing so in chat would be announcing your next move, though it’s not uncommon for players to chant it into a voice call or the text chatroot once the animation resolving the turn begins, even though by that point, the random numbers have already been generated. For the same reason, an opponent’s attack missing sometimes isn’t bad luck on their end but rather your own “skillful dodge.”

I then asked the informant whether they think this chant is an invocation or prayer, to which the informant responded that “it depends on the player.” While some players may desperately plea for luck, some other demand it with imperative authority in an attempt to manifest it into reality. The informant himself reports that he always utters it in an invocational form, the odds of willing it into existence proportional to the confidence they call it happening with, such as “watch this dodge right here” rather than desperately wishing with “please.”

I then asked if the informant has noticed differences between the folkier Smogon singles format and the VGC doubles (2v2) format, and while the informant suggests that there is a difference, it is apparently not due to the officialization of the format. The informant explains that smogon singles tend to be “harsher” due to the lower variance over a longer game (because less happen each turn with only two Pokemon on the field as opposed to four with odds that RNG evens out to the expected rates over a longer game), with more toxicity as the format has lower odds of RNG factors (because RNG effects don’t have two targets per instance of use) along with much more room for error (because each individual turn matters less in a longer singles game). Due to the option for players to play around RNG in singles that doubles formats don’t have, singles communities tend to be less forgiving when it happens while doubles communities have accepted that it’s almost inevitable within a game.

Analysis

Given the luck required of this game, the use of an incantation, sometimes even in imperative form as if manifesting it into reality reflects a form of contageous magic in verbally invoking an incident, as described by Frazer’s sympathetic magic. The difference between prayer and invocation is particularly interesting as prayer is more associated with blessings and curses, and prayers don’t dominate this chant over this invocations for the same reasons why English doesn’t have much curses and blessings, as the language and its societies have become less religious over the various historical events in the past such as the English reformation derparting from the Roman Catholic church and the Enlightenment era founding ideals of the United States. Coincidentally, invocations and “curses” in the imperative form seem to have overtaken in modern culture as people place more power into their own hands rather than an agnostic higher entity, similar to how people “manifest” something for themselves instead of praying for it or how people command others to “kill yourself” or “get cancer” in the imperative form instead of wishing them eternal suffering in hell in the subjunctive form. In the same vein, many players in the community opt to command hax to manifest for them in an imperative utterance of the chant rather than wishing for it in the subjunctive form.